Encrypted CSV files

[Richard Relpht]

Hiya ...

We do quite a bit of mailmerging here with CSV files that are concocted by a
database system. These are ornery CSV files and Winword (2003) mailmerges
them OK.

Now I would lke to add some security to these files as some of them contain
personal data, so I though it would be OK to encrypt the files so as not to
have this stuff on disks and USB keys and generally floating around.

Is there any way Winword can decrypt and mailmerge from encrypted data?
Is there any third part stuff out there that could help ?

Thanks for any help,

Richard

 

[Graham Mayor]

CSV files are simply plain text comma delimited files. Plain text has no
facility to contain formatting let alone password protection and Word has no
ability to decipher encrypted data.
You might have more success converting to Excel or a Word table and password
protecting the document.

--
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Graham Mayor - Word MVP


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[Richard Relpht]

Yes, I do actually know what csv files are.
But I imagined that it would be possible in a CSV file to preserve the CSV
structure and simply garble the field contents. But that would require that
Word have some way to ungarble if the user provided the correct key. ...
Which was why I was asking the question.


Example of the straight CSV data:
Name;Ad1;Ad2;ZIP;City
Lily;1 Gas Street;;70411;Gasville
Billy;2 Main St;Joborough;Soupsville

which, when, garbled would look like this:
Name;Ad1;Ad2;ZIP;City
GVDVCG;BVKJUY;GTFRFD45;MLOIN;GTFCDXS
HBVBOLK;TREDSEZ;GTFRDES;BVHGFVC

or even this:
DSDQAML;MLQNBGT;YBGTRFE;YHYHBM5;25FDCSM
GVDVCG;BVKJUY;GTFRFD45;MLOIN;GTFCDXS
HBVBOLK;TREDSEZ;GTFRDES;BVHGFVC

has no-one ever come up with a trick like that ?

Richard

 

[macropod]

Hi Richard,

You could store the csv data in a password-protected zip file or, alternatively, import the data into a password-protected Word
file. I'm not sure but, if you use the latter and make it your data source, the mailmerge process should prompt you for the password
before executing the merge.

Cheers

 

[Peter Jamieson]

1. macropod's .doc solution should work. If necessary, the .doc's password
can also be passed as a parameter in a Word VBA OpenDataSource call,
although the password would then be embedded in the relevant Word Mail Merge
Main Document and might be fairly easy to discover.

2. Otherwise, the only way I know to do this would be to write a text
converter that could read an encrypted file and convert it into a delimited
file in RTF format. Non-trivial (you have to get the converter SDK anf code
this sort of stuff in something that can produce a traditional WIn32 .dll,
e.g. C, C++, Delphi), you have to do special stuff to avoid further security
questions by Microsoft software, and you have to distribute the converter to
all your users. And you have to do the other bit, i.e. write something to
encode your csv s.

If you're trying to guard against deliberate hijacking of data, you then
have to be sure that your encryption algorithm is not easily cracked and
that any keys etc. are well guarded. And so on...