Personal Edition (PE)
Need to protect data in your Excel spreadsheets?
You can with the IRI CellShield® PE add-in, a uniquely ergonomic and proven data security enhancement for Microsoft Excel® 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Office 365 that delivers point-and-click data protections, including: data masking, encryption, and pseudonymization. Select the range of cells you want to protect, and then click the type of protection you need.
CellShield has saved me so much time. I subcontract for an event company and provide analytics. I’m often dealing with thousands of lines of data at a time. When posting reports online for clients, any personal info needs to be redacted and this program makes that so easy. It has become an indispensable tool.
JH – Hodges Logistics
A simple-to-use interface takes you through the steps, and CellShield does the work for you. It immediately protects the data you selected in the way you specified, or sends the protected results to another worksheet (to share) instead. CellShield also provides for decryption and reverse pseudonymization, so that you or other licensed users can conceal and reveal data in the same, or different, worksheets.
Q: Will those Excel users need their own license to decrypt?
A: Yes. And, they will need to use the decryption key and function you specify.
Q: Can the data mask be used on a formula? If yes, will the formula work?
A: Yes and No. You can mask the result of a formula, but not the formula itself, and your formula will not work on masked values.
The CellShield PE add-in also works from the CellShield Enterprise Edition (EE) add-in, too, and its masking functions are compatible with several of the enterprise-wide data protection functions available in IRI FieldShield® for relational databases and flat files, and with IRI DarkShield® for semi- and unstructured text files (logs, emails, JSON/XML/HL7/X12), .PDF and other MS Office files, images, NoSQL DBs, etc.
Note that you will need either CellShield EE or DarkShield to find and mask PII floating within free-form cell contents. IRI also provides data masking as a service, which may be less expensive than those options if you have fewer than 100 documents.
CellShield PE therefore extends the range of data sources and targets available for PII masking to Excel. For example, your IT department can encrypt flat-file or database columns with FieldShield, and business users can decrypt their data exports in Excel with CellShield. Note that these other enterprise products (FieldShield and DarkShield) also support PII discovery and masking in Excel; see this article regarding use cases.
In CellShield PE 2, encryption and decryption of formulas, UTF-8 support, and custom protection of data matching patterns (one file at a time in CellShield PE 2; unlimited in CellShield EE 2) was introduced, among other features/fixes.
Technical Details
Provider: Innovative Routines International (IRI), Inc.
First released: November 2014, V1.0.3. Updated: November 2022, V2.0.3,
Language: English
System Requirements
Supported Operating Systems: Windows 7-11
Microsoft Excel® 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Office 365.
Cost: $35 (non-refundable)
Installation & Purchase
Important: If you are prompted about Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Office (or VB) Runtime during installation, bookmark this page (Ctrl/Cmd+ D) and choose to Restart Now. Installation will automatically resume.
- Download the 32-bit CellShield PE add-in installer here, or the 64-bit version here, depending on the bit version of your Excel program, NOT your Windows O/S.
- Run the downloaded file to install the add-in.
- Launch Excel.
- Click the CellShield tab at the top of the ribbon bar, and then click on any CellShield button where a pop-up will direct you to purchase a license key.
- Click Purchase Page to open the web page where you pay for CellShield.
- Note that some users on some systems have reported issues with the pseudonymization function in releases prior to 1.5, for which a patch is available. Contact cellshield@iri.com if you need it post-purchase.
Free Self-Learning
Premium Support Options
If you are not an IRI FieldShield product or IRI Voracity platform licensee and need our help using IRI CellShield, we charge $125 per incident hour (minimum of one), or $1K per year for 10 incident hours and upgrades. Pay here, then email your payment confirmation page details and specific technical support request(s) to cellshield@iri.com.
CellShield, FieldShield, DarkShield, and Voracity are registered trademarks of Innovative Routines International (IRI), Inc. Microsoft and Excel are registered trademarks of Microsoft. Both corporations are wholly independent from each other.
