Excel 2013 is very slow in loading large workbooks, is there a way to open just the tab I want?

Hi Jacques,

All I can do is pass your comments on to my program managers, but please understand that I have no decision-making authority here, and the development team is convinced that they are doing the right thing for the product.

Regards,

Anita

Well, there appears to be at least one group that says they can crack the 2013 implementation of encryption:

Microsoft Office 2013 crackable, so look to Office password recovery

http://searchenterprisedesktop.techtarget.com/tip/Microsoft-Office-2013-crackable-so-look-to-Office-password-recovery

Hi Jacques,

I see your point about the protection being stronger if someone uses Passware or another good protection removal. Have you tried it with Excel 2007? Can they really break the new hashes in a short time? The way it was explained to me, I thought it was stronger than that.

I tried to download their trial version, but it won't do sheet protection.

Thanks,

Anita

 The reason is the stronger security in the protection, which is the same whether you do it programmatically or manually, but it isn't noticeable when you protect one sheet at a time manually. Protecting many of them programmatically compounds the problem. We have taken it to the developers already, andthey say that they added the strong security to make sheet protection stronger, and will not remove it or give us a way to opt out of it because to do that would reduce that protection. I really cannot share the exact details of the changes. 

Please forgive me that I do not agree.

Another big problem if you first protect the sheets programmatically, then save them in the protected state and finally disable the ProtectWorksheets code is the following.

With some software, as e.g. Passware Kit, you can unprotect the workbook and all worksheets in seconds while that is not possible if you are protecting during the file open code, because then the workbook and all sheets are always protected again and again with each opening of the file.

So as to me the protection is stronger when it's done prgrammatically with the workbook_open event.

I have tested this with Passware Kit and my workbook and worksheets (password protected in the way you have suggested: saved in protected state) were completely unprotected in a couple of seconds!!!

So the reason quoted from your developers (stronger protection) seems unfortunately to be a false reason. Give me back the former protection method and 1) my workbook will open faster when protected programmatically during file open code AND 2) the protection will be stronger with this method.

Best regards

Jacques

Hi Jacque,

Ouch - that's a huge problem! I really wish that I could offer you hope for a fix, but the problem is that it's not broken from a development standpoint.

Regards,

Anita