Verifying author

[Todd]

I'm a professor at a NE engineering college. I give my
students an Excel assignment that requires data
manipulation, plotting, linear regression, etc. Is there
anyway that I can determine if they just copied a file
from a fellow student. In other words, how can I make
sure that the students do their own work?

 

[Dave Peterson]

You might be able to see something under
File|Properties|Summary Tab

Sometimes, you can see stuff if you open the workbook in your favorite text
editor--don't save it. You could destroy the "excelness" of it.

You could do it with a copy to be safe.

But both of these could be easily overcome.

If you have two workbooks that look exceedingly similar that you want to check
for differences, you could use a program by Myrna Larson and and Bill Manville.

http://www.cpearson.com/excel/whatsnew.htm
look for compare.xla

It does a cell by cell comparison.

 

[John Wilson]

Todd,

Along with what Dave gave you for comparing the workbooks,
there are some workbook properties that can be accessed via
VBA.
Go into the VBA editor and search the help for
"builtindocumentproperties"
Sometimes the VBA help is rather finicky, so copy and paste
the above into the "Search (without the quotes).

Anyway....as an example.....

Sub TestMe()
MsgBox ThisWorkbook.BuiltinDocumentProperties.Item("Author")
End Sub

Will give you the UserName of the original Author of the workbook.
There are plenty of other properties that you could check the same
way (the VBA help defines all of them).

John