Hi Everyone,
I want to know if anyone has any insight into the System Generated Password feature when saving a template as excel. So far, everyone I’ve talked with in Professional Services and CSP all say “avoid it, no one knows what the password is”. But I can’t believe that’s really the case, because if that were so the option wouldn’t remain available in such an advanced product release.
I did a search on the user guide and while it does say it will auto-generate the password, it doesn’t say how to determine what the password will be.
I’ve gone ahead and tried it, and it does indeed allow opening the excel workbook and the worksheet is protected, and true to expectations, I don’t know what password to enter to unprotect it.
Perhaps this is a feature intended to never let the worksheet be unprotected? For changes, go back to Prophix? That’s a viable use case, I guess. And in reality, it’s only protecting the worksheet in excel–where it’s possible that one never wants the values to be updated by anyone.
Please–I’d love to hear the community feedback on this feature. I can’t believe “never use it” corresponds to the true purpose and intent of the feature.
The more I think of it, the more I think that the intent must be to preserve data and structural integrity so that values are not modified outside of the system. After all, Prophix should be the authority, and one of the risks in exporting to Excel is that the numbers can be modified in a one-off manner.
Still, I’d love to hear how others are using this feature, if at all.
I have never used that feature before but you made me curious so I tried it out. I like your theory of its not supposed to be unlocked for the integrity of the data but I don’t have an actual answer either but I would like to find out!
Never used it and doesn’t make sense why it is there if even the Prophix staff says avoid it! I have only used passwords that I enter; mostly so other users cannot change anything yet I can…mostly if I need to hide something or change formatting on the fly or to get approvals before changing in Prophix.
I have always taken the approach that if I don’t want someone to be able to manipulate data, I send it to them protected that way. Most of the time I just turn the password off!
I have never used it as well but am super curious to see what others say that might have used or what the Prophix team says the function is to be used for.
In my experience, akin to what you’ve mentioned, the use of system-generated password is to help you distribute the file and render it un-editable by anyone when accessing an offline copy (i.e. via the Save as Excel option). This system-generated password is not available in Prophix and typically is not shared. I have known that in dire situations clients (the admin/CSP user) have requested this password from Support via logging a ticket in zendesk. But the rule / expectation is that this is not a shared password and this option is only used when the template / report should not be edited when distributed offline. Hope this helps.
Hi Bob - you are correct, the system generated password is meant to preserve the data, to maintain the idea of “one truth”. The custom password option is added to allow for unprotecting the sheet if desired. I’ve seen that used in instances where reports should be protected for end users but the Admin or some subset of users may need to manipulate the file for some reason.
Hi Bob - I concur with Judy. Your assumption is correct.
‘system generated password’ will lock down the Excel document prohibiting any edits to the file, for everyone, to retain the integrity of the data.
‘Custom password’ will lock the excel document while still providing the ability to unlock it for a certain set of individuals.
Bob - Judy has got it. I always make sure that if someone else is going to be using my report templates that I set a custom password because inevitably they will be trying to download it to Excel (for some reason…)
