Help! iOS 6 unlocking protected Excel workbooks??

Question

Level 1

4 points

Help! iOS 6 unlocking protected Excel workbooks??

We have issued iPads and iPhones to our sales team and we use different Excel tools that have password protected sheets (and the entire workbook is password protected as well). The new iOS 6 has completely bypassed the protection when the Excel document is opened from an email attachment, and it is making all hidden rows and columns visible exposing confidential information to the users! This is a huge issue for us and we need to find a resolution ASAP!

Has anyone else experienced this and is there a solution??

iPad, iOS 6

Posted on Sep 26, 2012 9:36 AM

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Answer 1

Oct 4, 2012 10:21 AM in response to carolyn8642

I have as well, but can't seem to find any data on this subject.

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Answer 2

DSIMON1

Level 1

4 points

Oct 4, 2012 2:45 PM in response to carolyn8642

YES -- same issue here. Please fix!

Using MS Excel 2007 and iPhone 4 w/ iOS6.

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Answer 3

varjak paw

Level 10

182,662 points

Oct 4, 2012 2:54 PM in response to DSIMON1

http://www.apple.com/feedback/ipad.html

Or call Apple tech support and report it through them.

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Answer 4

thomas_r.

Level 7

32,031 points

Oct 4, 2012 3:10 PM in response to carolyn8642

If an iPad is able to display the contents of a password-protected Excel document without a password being entered, that says more about the lack of security of Excel's password protection than about the iPad. Although the iPad should certainly respect the password protection, I believe that the default password protection in Office does not encrypt anything. Thus, your password protection is a complete sham, causing you to have a false sense of security, since it can be bypassed trivially.

I believe that Office may offer the capability to encrypt the document, which would truly secure it against prying eyes. How that is done I'm not 100% sure (I haven't used Office in a few years now), and whether an iPad can read an encrypted Excel file I'm not sure.

Thank your iPad for pointing out to you a serious flaw in the supposed security of Office's password protection!

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Answer 5

Feb 24, 2013 6:04 PM in response to carolyn8642

I have not seen that - but haven't really tried exactly what you are saying.

What I have done with a tool I am responsbile for is write an Export Macro that extracts only the portions of the working doc that is for the users to see - you may need to use PasteSpecial along the way to preserve values that are dependent on the hidden data. That way no matter if the xls that is sent to the customer has password protection or not there is no hidden data to be exposed - and the file is smaller.

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Answer 6

Oct 21, 2013 7:19 PM in response to carolyn8642

We are currently experiencing this problem in our office. We've made a excel document available for download by the public. But we've locked it so that people can't copy the data that easily. If its opened in windows, the cells cant be selected, nor copied to clipboard. But when we tried opening it on an Ipad. Everything was selectable and copiable. I really think Microsoft has a security flaw issue here. Has anyone found a workaround?

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