Excel® 2007 Dashboards & Reports For Dummies®

Chapter 13. Sharing Your Work with the Outside World

Let's face it; you're not making these dashboards and reports for your amusement. At some point, you'll want to share your handiwork with others. The focus of this chapter is preparing your dashboards for life outside your PC. Here, explore the various methods of protecting your work from accidental and purposeful meddling and discover how you can distribute your dashboards via PowerPoint and PDF (Portable Document Format).

Protecting Your Dashboards and Reports

You've put in a ton of hours getting your dashboard and reports to work the way you want them to. The last thing you need is to have a clumsy client or an overzealous power-user botching up your Excel file.

Before distributing any Excel-based work, you should always consider protecting your file by using the protection capabilities native to Excel. Although none of Excel's protection methods are hacker-proof, they do serve to protect the formulas, data structures, and other objects that make your reporting mechanisms tick.

Securing the entire workbook using file protection options

Perhaps the best way to protect your Excel file is to employ Excel's file protection options. These options enable you to apply protection at the workbook level, requiring a password to view or make changes to the file. This method is by far the easiest to apply and manage. With this method, there's no need to protect each worksheet one at a time. You can simply apply a blanket protection to guard ...