Prevent Users from Performing Certain Actions

Hack #3

Although Excel provides overall protection for workbooks and worksheets,

this blunt instrument doesnt provide limited privileges to usersunless you
do some hacking.

You can manage user interactions with your spreadsheets by monitoring and
responding to events. Events, as the term suggests, are actions that occur as
you work with your workbooks and worksheets. Some of the more common events include opening a workbook, saving it, and closing it. You can
tell Excel to run some Visual Basic code automatically when any one of
these events is triggered.
Users can bypass all these protections by disabling macros
entirely. Click the Office button and choose Excel Options
Trust Center Trust Center Settings and press the Macro
Settings Button (pre-2007, Tools Macro Security). If
their security is set to Disable all macros with notification
(Medium in pre-2007 versions), theyll be notified of macros
in the workbook upon opening it and will be offered the
opportunity to turn them off. A security setting of Disable
all macros without notification (High in older versions) will
simply turn them off automatically. On the other hand, if
using the spreadsheet requires the use of macros, users might
be more likely to have macros turned on. These hacks are a
convenience and do not provide heavy-duty data security.
On Mac OS X, you cannot control macro protection at this
level of detail. Instead, you can select Excel Preferences
Security and toggle the setting Warn before opening a file
that contains macros.

Preventing Save As... in a Workbook

You can specify that any workbook be saved as read-only by choosing Office
button Save Tools Button General Options and enabling the Readonly recommended checkbox (pre-2007, File Save As Tools [Options
on the Mac] General options in the Save options dialog). Doing so can
prevent a user from saving any changes he might make to the file, unless he
saves it with a different name and/or in a different location.