ExcelPass

The security of your personal documents is a must in a world where data theft is thriving. Password-protecting your documents should not be a difficult task if you use a reliable Office suite but, if you opt for a third-party application to carry out the task, then ExcelPass might do the trick.

The purpose of ExcelPass is to provide a quick means of assigning a password to your primary documents, thus preventing unauthorized access to potentially sensitive information. Despite its name, ExcelPass does not only work with Excel documents, but it can also process Word and PowerPoint files, PDF files, as well as ZIP archives.

However, note that Office must be installed for the application to be able to recognize XLS, DOC and PPT files. If you don't have Office, then PDF and ZIP are the only two formats you can process.

With a simple interface that comprises all the features in one window, ExcelPass is easy to operate and no instructions are needed for you to get the hang of it.

The first thing you need to do is drag and drop the files you want to encrypt onto the main window of ExcelPass. Note that no browse button is available, so drag and drop is the only method to add new files.

The application allows batch operations to encrypt or decrypt both Office documents and ZIP archives. To encrypt files, you must enter a password in the dedicated field, be it to write-protect the file or read-protect it. The maximum length of the password is 15 characters, which should be enough to create a strong security key.

Unfortunately, there is no embedded password generator, like it happens with many other similar utilities, so you will have to enter the key manually. Nevertheless, this is not necessarily a bad thing, since you must remember the password to be able to decrypt the files and gain access to their content.

With a name that might be confusing, ExcelPass allows you to restrict read or write access to your personal documents, thus adding them an extra layer of protection. As suggested above, some improvements are necessary here and there but, overall, the application does its job.