Many years ago a company I worked for used to send out a spreadsheet to its suppliers which they would complete with the products they offered and then when it was received back there was a button in the spreadsheet that would automatically upload the data to a central database.
When I first saw this I was curious how it worked and did a bit of investigation - turns out there was VBA behind the button that established the database connection and uploaded the data. What was amusing was that the user had hardcoded the database connection string including username and password. Of course this wouldn't work outside of the firewall - but I'd be careful about letting people get too crazy.
To be honest, not hard coding a connection string is quite tough too. It really isn't an easy problem to solve. And especially when every piece of software out there connects to data in different ways.
The reality of the situation is with proper IT support, there could be compiled Excel Addins which provide API connections to core systems such that proper authentication also takes place. But that requires a first step by IT. Either that or authentication via a web server to get a temporary connection string. Either way, it requires prior infrastructure.
Many years ago a company I worked for used to send out a spreadsheet to its suppliers which they would complete with the products they offered and then when it was received back there was a button in the spreadsheet that would automatically upload the data to a central database.
When I first saw this I was curious how it worked and did a bit of investigation - turns out there was VBA behind the button that established the database connection and uploaded the data. What was amusing was that the user had hardcoded the database connection string including username and password. Of course this wouldn't work outside of the firewall - but I'd be careful about letting people get too crazy.