Licensing excel spreadsheet for sale

Hi,

The first thing to say is that you're dealing with an Excel application whose prime reason for existence was not to be a fully protectable bespoke application on the lines you're thinking. Excel does have rudimentary protection mechanisms but none that I know of for which there aren't tools out there which will hack the protection. That said,

1. You could use a Workbook Open macro that detects when the current system date is greater than a date you've recorded in the macro and which immediately pops up a warning message and then immediately closes the workbook. You can protect the Visual Basic Environment with a password to prevent a casual user from seeing the control date and changing it.

2. On the purchase of a licence you could either simply send them an unrestricted workbook, or in a similar manner to 1 above record a licence key in the workbook open macro, and have a licence number cell somewhere in the workbook that the user would use to enter the licence key you give them and which the workbook open event would first check. If the licence key check passes then the macro would bypass the evaluation period date check.

3. I'm not aware that you can restrict Excel to a particular machine

4. If the workbook is licensed and hence unrestricted then it could be sent to anyone whether they are a licensed user or not.

5. You could disable the Ctrl-C key with a macro, but a simple way round would be to create another macro in another workbook that enables Ctrl-C