I did say I was a skeptic. And I never said that this particular poster said
anything about a situation. All I did was state my opinion. And you stated
yours. That's cool. The world would be boring if everyone agreed with me.
I'd have to change my mind about things - and then so would everyone else.
ARGH!!! :-)

--

JoAnn Paules
MVP Microsoft [Publisher]



"JE McGimpsey" wrote in message
...
FWIW, I think JoAnn was rather out of line on this one. Assuming that
someone (who, BTW, posted under a real name and email address and who
has been a relatively frequent poster to many groups) is "nefarious" is
pretty harsh, not to mention horribly paternalistic.

Just based on my experience, it's far more likely that the OP has
forgotten the password on his own important file than that he was trying
to do something illegal - there was nothing in the original post to
indicate one way or the other, though the circumstantial evidence seems
heavily weighted toward legitimacy. (I don't know where JoAnn's "You
mean that's what they *say* is the situation" comes from, since the OP
*didn't* say.)

Unfortunately, XL's password protection is a sham. It ill-serves users
to withhold commonly available tools - it may even lead them to think
that XL's password protections are reliable, when they most definitely
are not.

I assist people on these groups because I like to, not because of what
they might do with it. I'm not going to withhold commonly available
information about passwords from a user just because they might be
dishonest, any more than I worry about whether someone uses that nifty
SUMPRODUCT() formula that I gave them to further their embezzlement.

I've posted a method of bypassing internal password controls to my site
as a convenience - the macro was being posted several times a week to
the newsgroups anyway, so anyone with the sense to Google could find
them.

Likewise, if the OP had chosen to Google for a password crack, he'd have
found hundreds of posts recommending cheap commercial solutions for file
passwords (I don't know of any free ones that are worth anything for
reasonably long passwords).


In article ,
Sarah Balfour wrote:

I'm with Jo on this one - I wouldn't assist anyone in cracking a
passworded
document even if they say their intentions are honourable - I don't want
to
be party to any nefarious dealings. I believe it was Beth who said that
she
was once asked to crack a file and it turned out to be someone's personal
journal.