Gregan

Regarding data classification, the data concerned doesn't have to meet a very high level of protection - it is private data, not of national interest, but I feel that it should have some level of protection. Maybe I'm being paranoid about GDPR, preferring to err on the side of caution and I understand your point that Affinity Publisher would now need to handle the password which would put a potential legal burdon upon Affinity. I guess the only way around that would be that Apub should handle data sources like Excel in the way that many other applications do – require that the data source be already open before Apub needs to aquire the data so that the password has been dealt with in the original application (Excel in this instance). I have to say that I have learned a lot in having this discussion and that it will likely change the way I handle things. Thanks for your input, dkenner.

Walt, the mail-merge Affinity output file would contain the sensitive data but it will be deleted after printing; it's a pity one can't mail-merge directly to a printer, as you can with MS Word mail-merges; I'd use Word if I could bt Word doesn't handle mail-merges with data-fetched images very well. Of course, GDPR precautions need to be continued with the printed material but it is used locally and in the control of the people sharing it. I'm fully conversant with the GDPR requirements - the vulnerable part of the process is the sharing of the database via Dropbox, hence the password protection requirement. As you will know, password protected .xlsx files are also encrypted by the password protection. The sensitivity of the data isn't in the league of state secrets (!) but protection is necessary to comply with GDPR requirements.

Hi Walt, I don't think I agree with your analysis. The situation I am dealing with is a shared Excel .xlsx database in Dropbox; the mail-merged Affinity file is used locally where it isn't going to be reshared and it contains data which is appropriate for the situation - these are not letters I'm dealing with but other documents which are generally not shared. Because of GDPR, the spreadsheet in Dropbox has to be protected as it contains names and contact details of folk. It's a pity that Affinity files can't be password protected, either, but at least they should cope with password protected data source files like Excel. Folk assume that Affinity is always used for similar purposes - my use is possibly unusual. Serif's now obsolete product PagePlus could be used for such purposes as it relied upon the Excel source file being opened before the PagePlus mail-merge "template" file was opened; the action of opening the Excel file required the password to be entered in Excel so the necessary protection was achieved.

Replying to Old Bruce, I agree - I don't want to have to remove the password as it contains details which should be protected. Affinity needs to provide the means to handle password protected Excel files - I would have thought that this was a basic design requirement. I was hoping to discover that there is a way to handle this with the password in place!

I'm new to Affinity but have experience using other publishing packages. I want to do "data merging" (mail-merging) in Publisher using a password protected .xlsx spreadsheet but there doesn't seem to be a way of entering the password and password protected spreadsheets don't seem to work with Publisher; if the password is removed, it does then work but this is not satisfactory. I have observed that, unlike other programs (e.g. PagePlus and Word), you don't have to have open the spreadsheet before performing the data merge; having to have the spreadsheet open is where the password gets used in these other programs but even having opened the password protected spreadsheet before attempting data merge with Publisher doesn't fix the problem. Is there a solution short of removing the password? Gregan