Paternalism is what I’m trying to avoid. Parents have a responsibility to talk to their children. I don’t have or want a responsibility to direct the morality of the readers. I have ‘chosen’ to shield the passers-by from materials I think are inappropriate. (Chosen makes it sound more noble than it is – passers-by because I’m not concerned with the regular readers, they’re all top notch citizens.)

Despite my lame justifications, you make a very good point.

At some point you have no value. I’ll just search Google first. In this case, I shouldn’t bother coming here.

Your paternalism is actually harmful, because the first encounter readers now have with this information might be from less ethical perspectives. It’s like parents that won’t talk about sex and drugs. Their kids learn from pimps and pushers.

Write a statement about why people shouldn’t crack the code and then link to the products/services that support those ethics on their sites. Your readers are asking about it. If you don’t guide them then someone else will and that might not be good.

In case they are monitoring this discussion: If they offer us $20 million, we will change the name.

And since their argument is that our name causes people to be confused into thinking the product is from Microsoft, the new name, once they crush us, will be TurboExcelIsNotFromMicrosoft.

“really want to see VBA code w/out paying for commercial password-breaking”

I wasn’t surprised to see that Google found the exact comment page from your (Dick’s) site, but I was surprised to see that they also offered up a cached version of the original page that has the url in it! The url is now dead though. In fact, the whole domain seems to be down.

Oh, I knew that would come back to bite me in the *ss. It’s at the top of the list, Jason, unless one of the smarter authors wants to take a stab it, then I humbly step aside.

And since you made the offer…

I would love to see an article about DoEvents. It appears to be a critical component in any VBA code for Excel games or the like. For example, I’ve seen it in many of Andy Pope’s cool applications (www.andypope.info) and Kouichi Tani’s amazing games found on Aaron Blood’s website (www.xl-logic.com/pages/games.html).

While I understand it’s basic application and created a small macro that incorporates it, a formal discussion by the experts about how to implement it properly would be great.

Thanks Dick.

Regards,
Jason

Looking at other people’s work to learn something is very valuable. So I know what you guys are saying. I don’t have any problem reverse engineering, so if you want to know how something works, tell me and I’ll post it. Screw how those other hacks do it, you can learn the right way here (because you know if I post the wrong way, there will be a comment or two).

I want to know what’s going on with the TurboExcel name too. I’m guessing they want that whole thing to die down and be forgotten.

Lastly, if you want know how to crack passwords, then do what I do when I want to know something. Google it.

2) Company spreadsheets to prove to others (the authors) their security is no as hot as they claim.

3) Microsoft’s atpvbaen.xla to remove the debug.print lines they left in by accident (needn’t have bothered now I know the password!!)

BPB to DBx. Whoever thought of that anyway?