Most of us know that .dll’s are the only real option if security is a genuine issue, but I think the following might be a possible (bodge) solutions for those who many not have VB, and need better security for their VBA code. Anyway, I was looking at this site:

Tech Net - Office 2000/Visual Basic Programmer’s Guide

Chapter 17 deals with security. My lighting fast brain crawled in to action and I thought I’d try something.

Now according to this info:

In Access, you can save an .mdb or .adp file as a file type that contains only compiled VBA code without the source code.

These files are called .mde file and most of us will have worked with these before, or at least heard of them. I didn’t know the code was compiled though. Doing a little bit of goggling it seems that decompiling is available, but that the VBA code remains compiled, i.e. forms and report are easy to decompile, but the VBA remains compiled – good news.

See where we are heading? You can call this .mde code from you Excel/Word etc VBA, and your more sensitive VBA code can be kept in a complied- harder to get at - .mde file. In theory it’s a bit like putting your code in a proper .dll – it’s compiled code. Which kinda begs the question, why can you do this with all our VBA?

Here is an example I’ve put it into a UDF, and it runs in such a way as to be dog slow, but it could be implemented better, or if the situations was different the performance hit would be less noticeable – I’m sure you’ll get the idea. I’ve inculed the orginal mdb, and you can do all the other passwording etc to this mde before making it a mde. I’ve also chnaged the file extention to change the icon, whcih is of little importance.

So, it’s Heath Robison, it’s far from ideal but it might be useful to someone; oneday! A nice little idea I though…