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It's the year 2017 and anybody who needs to use hashes should avoid 'broken' ones such as MD5, if security is important. Has anybody found or created a way to do more secure SHA256 or SHA512 hashing in Excel, without using VBA or macros?

A spectacular example of this being done before was over 3½ years ago with MD5 (as seen in this SO: MD5 Hash function in excel without using VBA).

Reason for avoiding VBA/Macros: Compatibility with mobile devices, such as Excel for iOS.

Side Note: The original Stack Overflow post has a successful answer with a dead link, here is a new link for reference: https://tzamtzis.gr/2017/web-analytics/excel-function-md5-hashing-without-vba/

JKVeganAbroad
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  • Seriously, start a bounty.. get the original coder.. or an intern. ( : | Implementing an encryption algorithm is not easy yet it is not impossible. Since you'd mentioned avoiding 'broken' hashes is important, I think that easily rule out SHA256 & SHA512 . | IMHO: if your bussiness need this, it's worth developing it inhouse. – p._phidot_ Jul 24 '18 at 19:18
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    I could not more oppose the comment of @p-phidot. This does not help the OP in any way, is very rude in my opinion, and adds NOTHING to getting close to an answer to this valid question *whatsoever*. Please stop with these kinds of senseless and unhelpful comments. – MS Berends Aug 01 '22 at 13:34

1 Answers1

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I've got one. Limits to 55 characters and designed more for educational purposes (i.e. how to see how SHA256 works in Excel....?).

To recap...

  • No VBA.
  • No named ranges.
  • No arrays.
  • Uses standard Excel functions found in 2007 and higher.
  • Format is *.xlsx

Download from OneDrive

or

Download from Google Drive

pgSystemTester
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    Thank you @PGSystemTester ! This is amazing, it even works on my iPhone! Sorry I took so long to thank you – JKVeganAbroad Jul 25 '19 at 14:30
  • This method doesn't populate down a column as it's designed. How would that be done? – mindmischief Jun 22 '20 at 22:45
  • @mindmischief Google sheets has a script library for doing sha256 as an array which you could leverage as a custom function. From there, you could drag down a column of values. Sample file here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1alk5njX-ZK7jqWKqq9n9kGRmeXoP1O2dgWGYzbHf7fU/edit#gid=0 Note there are much better methods of doing this if you're trying to do some cracking of some kind. – pgSystemTester Mar 29 '21 at 22:53