I have developed a spreadsheet for the design of imaging astro systems. It allows you to do what-if studies on things like FNo, aperture, QE, seeing, well depth, sky brightness etc and work out things like SNR, dynamic range, sampling, signal level, optimum sub length etc.
Any one got ideas on the best way to make it available? - I understand that spreadsheets are good places to hide nasties and I want to make sure that it is protected from vandalism and that users will feel comfortable downloading.
Excel offers 2 layers of password protection. The first is to stop viewing anything. The second is to prevent editing of the document, but it allows viewing.
You should be able to password-protect it, so that it can be viewed but not edited. That should stop people adding malicious code to your work of art.
Also, if you are having trouble sending it (some email pages won't accept .xls or .xlsx files), then change the suffix to something like .ymt, or something that has no file associations. You would just need to specify to the receiver, to change the suffix back to the original form.
This is how I send them across skype.
EDIT: You could also export it as a PDF, and password protect that. That way, it is essentially an eBook.
Try Gnumeric or LibreOffice / OpenOffice. The latter is in some ways more flexible but the former is my favourite because it's fast and numerically superior. CSV is the best format for spreadsheets without formulas (it's plain text).
Not sure what the best is for more complicated stuff, but if you want to share with the most people possible, then MS Excel format is what is used most widely. That is what most people find easiest. Just make sure your file is clean and upload to the cloud.
