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Office 2008 Planning
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Plan a strategy to control access to workbooks
As an administrator, you must assign the appropriate permissions to the user accounts that will be
connecting to the databases. Users must then provide their account information when they
connect to the external data source network (DSN) by using third-party ODBC drivers.
To connect to an external DSN, on the
Data menu, click Get External Data.
Caution
If users have permissions that are too broad in scope, they might be able to modify
queries in Microsoft Query to add, delete, or modify data that is stored on the server or to
delete databases and tables.
To prevent unauthorized users from modifying queries and then saving them in the
database, make sure that all users have the correct permissions assigned to them at the
database server level. For example, you can restrict users who have permission to view
snapshots of workbooks from altering any of the data in the workbooks, or prevent them
from altering the query that is used to retrieve data. Users can still open, interact with,
refresh, and recalculate workbooks that have read restrictions; but they cannot save any
modifications to the workbook on the server. They can save revisions only locally.
Working with macros
Microsoft Visual Basic macros cannot be run or edited in Office 2008. But if you want to retain the
functionality of existing macros, you can convert them to a native Mac OS X scripting language
such as AppleScript or Automator.
To see the specific actions that are available in AppleScript or Automator for a specific Office
application, in the Finder, in the folder in which Office 2008 has been installed (usually the
Applications folder or /Users/username/Applications), drag the icon for the Office application from
the Microsoft Office 2008 folder to either the Script Editor application icon in
Applications/AppleScript or the Automator application icon in the Applications folder.
Although users cannot edit or run Visual Basic macros in Office 2008, documents that contain
Visual Basic macros can be opened, edited, and saved correctly in Office 2008. Documents that
contain macros can be passed back and forth between Office 2008 and other versions of Office
without loss of the macro coding; macros will continue to run in the versions of Office that
permit it.
For more information about Automator, see Working with Automator
on the Apple Developer
Web site (developer.apple.com).