Excel on Remko's Blog

Programmatically set Excel LinkedCell property with VBA

Wed, 22 May 2013 11:36:48 +0000

Yesterday I was working with an Excel document that contained Combobox form controls.

I wanted to count the number of cells containing a particular value using the COUNTIF formula. However the count returned 0 because the LinkedCell property of the Combobox was not set to the Cell that contained the Combobox.

To set the LinkedCell Ctrl-Click the Combobox to select it, right-click and select Format Control. Then set the correct Cell in the Cell link field:

My sheet contained about 150 Comboboxes, so obviously I was going to do this using a script. I couldn't find anything useful with Google so I wrote my own Macro.

Excel 2010 multi-threaded calculation

Fri, 08 Jun 2012 13:21:19 +0000

I was just browsing through the Options tab in Excel 2010 when I noticed the following setting:

This feature was introduced in Excel 2007.
In the default settings, multi-threaded calculation is Enabled with "Use all processors on this computer".

On a physical desktop this would be the preferred setting since it will make formula calculation as fast as possible.

Session freeze when starting Excel

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 15:42:25 +0000

Environment
Windows 2003 Enterprise (32 bit), Citrix XenApp 5, RES Workspace Manager 2011, McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8.7.0i.

Problem
When a opening an Excel workbook from Sharepoint the whole session freezes.

I asked the user to open an Excel workbook from Sharepoint and I noticed the following popup:

So my first thought was that the user somehow clicked this message to the background and IE was waiting for a response.

The XLSploit explained

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 23:36:34 +0000

Recently I published a Proof of Concept that showed it was possible to launch unauthorized processes with both AppSense Application Manager and RES Workspace Manager.

Although I didn’t test Microsoft Applocker I have no doubt at all that we couldn’t bypass it.

I have named my Proof of Concept the XLSploit because I am using Excel as a trampoline. I choose Excel because this is generally a trusted process and VBA offers access to the Windows API that is needed.

After publishing the XLSploit I have talked to both RES and AppSense and not that they both have a response to my Proof of Concept, I consider it safe to tell a little more about how it works.

If you are merely interested in stopping the XLSploit, please scroll down to the end of the article.