Friday, November 14, 2008

Excel 2007 Macro Security Problem

I had written certain Macro on an Excel 2003 Workbook to be distributed hence the Sheet was protected as well the the Macro. It used to work perfectly, it even used to work in Excel 2007 after opening up in Compatibility Mode.

Recently after finding the need to work with larger sets of data I decided to save the file as a Macro Enabled Worksheet. Unfortunately my woes just began. On opening the newly created page I received the Security Warning that macro have been disabled as shown below.


On selecting options there was no longer an option to enable this content. Adding the location to the trusted location etc etc did not have any affect. After reading up a bit I came to know that there exist a registry hack to disable Excel 2007 from mandating that the Macro needs to be scanned by the Antivirus.

You can either save the below code into a .reg file and execute it or go into your registry to the location mentioned. Add the DWORD and set it to 1

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Excel\Security]
"ExcelBypassEncryptedMacroScan"=dword:00000001


Post the registry correction you have the option to enable this content as shown in the image below.



The helpful resource that helped me solve this problem was

http://www.rondebruin.nl/password2007.htm


Another useful site that I have come across to help users move into Excel 2007 is

http://office.microsoft.com/assistance/asstvid.aspx?assetid=XT101493291033&vwidth=1044&vheight=788&type=flash&CTT=11&Origin=HA101491511033


It allows you to quickly find out where each of the option of Excel 2003 are found in Excel 2007. Hope you found this useful, do drop me a comment if possible.