We have developed a financial model in excel worth in the neighborhood of $75-100k and many people in our industry have similar financial models.<p>How would you keep it from being stolen if you wanted a client/employee to use it without taking it with them or using a copy on their own PC? Is there a way to allow use of an excel model without ownership?
use www.cellmaster.com.au (disclosure I am the founder) At the moment it is free for low volume usage.<p>These also look like they would do what you want, maybe spreadsheetconverter depends on your needs:<p>BaseCase.com<p>stoic.com<p>www.spreadsheetconverter.com<p>www.smartsheet.com<p><a href="http://www.forguncy.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.forguncy.com/</a> (Japanese)<p>www.spreadsheetweb.com<p>Please tell me more. Details of my email on www.cellmaster.com.au.<p>P.S. I also like ethercalc as spreadsheetguru suggested - but think many of above would be less work.
implement a DRM mechanism. One way is to build an authentication server, log against a license, and rotate licenses as needed if you find curious activity. This is not a new problem and has been done previously. You may need to get creative with the code. I'm assuming that your model is quite visible for someone to reverse engineer by looking at VB project in Excel. You need to find a way to hide it as well.
you implement it on the serverside as an API or webapp that you sell as a service.
There are many ways of doing this, for example resolver one, or ethercalc. In the olden days would have probably written a webapp that interfaced with excel directly using the COM APIs, but that went aggainst MSFT's EULA.