Whether we are talking about professional or more domestic environments, with the passage of time the confidentiality of our office files has increased. By this we mean that the documents that we create in programs such as Word, Excel, Write or Calc, contain data that we do not want to fall into other hands in most cases.
The truth is that only a few years ago we limited ourselves to working with this type of information locally, on our computer. However, the world of technology has changed a lot, more since the arrival of the internet to most of our devices. That is precisely why we are handling more and more sensitive and private information, so we will have to take additional precautionary measures. For this we can use applications focused on security such as antivirus, for example.
But at the same time, the software solutions that are responsible for creating these files, also propose their own functions related to this. This is precisely the case that we are going to talk about below with one of the most interesting alternatives to Microsoft‘s popular Excel. Specifically, we refer to the program called Calc, which is part of the free LibreOffice office suite. Surely many of you already know that this is a perfect software solution to carry out both domestic and small business accounting.
That is why on certain occasions we will need to use the security and privacy functions to protect our Calc spreadsheets. This will allow us to maintain the confidentiality of the data stored here, even if we share these files or they are stolen.
Protect Calc spreadsheets in LibreOffice
As we mentioned before the developers of this type of applications, in placements they want us to make things easier in this regard. This is the case of the office automation proposal that we mention here. Therefore, one of the most effective measures that we can carry out to prevent unwanted access to a spreadsheet is to protect it with a password.
For this that we tell you, the first thing we have to do is design and create the spreadsheet in a conventional way on our PC. The change comes, once we have finished it, through the Save as function that we usually use. Therefore, if we want to store the project we are working on, initially we go to the File / Save as menu. But now we are going to have to pay special attention to the window that appears on the screen.
And it is that at the bottom of it we are going to find a selector that by default is not marked that says Save with password . In the event that we mark the option that we are commenting on, after establishing a file name and clicking on the Save button, a new window will appear in which we indicate the access password to that file. It is easy to imagine that whoever does not have it will not be able to see its content. With these simple steps we will add a security plus to the spreadsheets that we want in LibreOffice Calc.
At the same time if we want to go a step further. In this sense we can also encrypt the file created with a GPG key . This is an option that we also find in this same window.
