Warning prompts when opening workbooks
In 1999, the Melissa virus infected countless computers around the world. The virus spreads itself in the form of infected Microsoft Word documents. Over the years, Microsoft added several levels of defense to their products to prevent a recurrence of a similar virus. The trade-off is that users are often subject to warning prompts every time they open a spreadsheet.
In this section, I’ll discuss the most frequent prompts that appear and how you can manage the risks of working with spreadsheets of unknown provenance. First, let’s discuss the Protected View feature in Excel for Windows.
Protected View
Protected View first appeared in Excel 2007. It is designed to allow you to safely open and review a document in a sandbox environment that prevents it from making any changes to your computer. As shown in Figure 2.17, you can view but not edit the document when it is in Protected View:
Figure 2.17 –...
