Archive for February, 2009

Database passwords in Excel workbooks

February 17, 2009

Excel PivotTables are really useful for analyzing data. Excel allows me to use any database via ODBC to get data.

Unfortunately Excel also stores the username, password and query in the spreadsheet which is bad, since I want to share the data, but not the database credentials.

login

$ xxd example.xls | less

password_in_spreadsheet

The password and query can be removed from an external data set. Right click, choose External Data Properties.

data_range_options

The password can be removed from a pivot table. Right click, choose Pivot Table Options.

pivot_table_options