Private Information .

Grace Skibicki, one of the long-time administrators of The Internet Writing Workshop, recently discovered a useful bit of technical information. She says, "I read an interesting response to a technical question regarding Excel. In our recent Sunday paper this question was posed by a reader: He wanted to email an Excel file but wanted to make sure it could be read only, not edited."

The response was as follows. He was told that the "information rights management" in recent versions of Excel can enforce that kind of restriction but requires special Microsoft server software.

Google offers a cheaper and easier way to do this. Upload the file to Google's free Goggle Docs site (docs.google.com). You can limit some readers to read-only and also allow others to edit your work.

Grace continues, "I found this in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (June 1st). But the article was originally posted on May 25th in the Washington Post. It was written by Rob Pegoraro."

"I thought it might be helpful for those times when you want to send a piece of writing but do not want editing."