Excel 2010 Can a Read Only Excel document be enabled to sort and search?

[Drjh68]

Greetings (my first post!)

I am responsible for a private library. We want to provide on a computer there a full copy of the catalogue, but not to enable members to alter the content accidentally.
The catalogue is in four columns - serial number, category, author, title.

Is there a way to enable in such a presentation sorting by columns, and searching generally, using the sort and search tools in Excel, or by some non-Excel method? At present it seems not to be possible. I hope that is not the case.

Many thanks.

James

[TMS]

You could make the workbook Read-Only in Windows using the Properties dialogue. Right click on the file in Windows Explorer, select Properties, and tick Read-only. The user would be able to do whatever is allowed, assuming that you have protected the worksheet(s) (in Excel) but allowed sorting and filtering.

They may be able to save a copy on the drive, depending what access they have. But it would make sense for the file to be stored in a folder on a drive where the general public have only Read-only access.


Regards, TMS