There are some nice ideas in this post. However, the user of the Excel spread sheet does not necessarily have Perl on their PC and they won't want to be downloading encryption software to their PC. I think that the solution lies in using VB script. I will need to think about it a little bit more. Does anyone know of a bit of Perl code that encrypts and reads back the encrypted text. I could use that as a basis for producing the VB script and corresponding Perl script.