Can you hire an Excel Consultant remotely without sharing confidential data?
If you are sending confidential data to third parties, you should ensure appropriate non-disclosure agreements are in place. At Excel4Business we can provide a template NDA to prospective clients, but we’re also happy to sign any reasonable legal document. Even with appropriate agreements in place, you should ask any consultancy where your data will be stored and look for a track record of working with sensitive data. It also makes sense to keep your data on-shore or in secure servers in reputable jurisdictions.
The safest way to work with an Excel expert is to not send them sensitive data at all. A lot of Excel development work involves the building of unpopulated templates and, even where Excel is being used for data processing, it is often possible to provide dummy data. There are trade-offs involved in providing representative dummy data but, where spreadsheets contain protected personal information, this can often be removed entirely as a consultant has a good feel for how long a name is.
If you are sending sensitive information, we would recommend password protecting your files in transit. Although a consultancy’s data security practices should prevent unauthorised users accessing your files, you may misaddress an e-mail.
It isn’t efficient to develop Excel files through a remote connection; experienced programmers work best when a computer responds immediately to their key presses and mouse moves. However, it can make sense for diagnosing issues that arise in real datasets that weren’t encountered in dummy data. Fixes tend to be fast and, if the issue is environment dependent, screen sharing may be essential to a resolution. By fixing in situ, it saves you having to re-populate a template file with real data.
Although prepping dummy data or hosting screen-sharing sessions adds friction to the development process, it isn’t frictionless to get a user on-site. You will have to create Windows accounts and will still require a non-disclosure agreement.
This article looks at how Excel4Business’ team can minimise friction working remotely. A summary is listed in the table below:
Can Excel4Business provide a non-disclosure agreement for my project?
Yes, our standard NDA is a single page that can be easily understood and enforced. As well as covering confidentiality, other clauses recognise your rights over your intellectual property and that we will not use your submissions for any purpose other than scoping and delivering a service. The document states the governing laws but allows for enforcement anywhere. As a very short document, it is very clear on our obligations.
Some clients ask us to sign their own non-disclosure agreements. Where these deal solely with protecting confidentiality and the value of a client’s data, we will happily sign them. The most common additional clauses required are on the destruction of materials, the term length, how the document stands alongside other agreements and assignment in case of company sale. Occasionally there will be references to specific legislation and courts.
Those additional clauses can be very important; if a business is sold, it wants agreements to remain enforceable. The reason they are not included in our boilerplate NDA are that different companies have different requirements. One of our client’s NDAs specifies a term length of three years after which point trade secrets remain confidential in perpetuity, but other data only remains covered for a further five years. The expiration date exists because more extensive NDAs, referencing specific legislation, require regular legal review.
We do review all NDAs and occasionally find clauses we cannot sign up to. We normally discuss such issues with a client’s legal team and find a mutually acceptable solution.
Can I control in which countries will my data be stored?
At Excel4Business, we can tell you who has access to your data and where they are based. If you want to work with a US based consultant, we can set up you up with a consultant in the United States. As you work with an individual consultant, your files will not then be accessible on a shared drive within the company. It is the case that our mail servers are based in the United Kingdom though, exceptionally, alternative communication channels could be arranged to meet a client’s requirements.
All companies choose whether to share confidential information with employees, contractors and suppliers. As with any of those relationships, if you would like to work with an Excel consultant, you would look for someone you trusted. The reason their location matters is because you want to have realistic legal recourse for data breaches, and to know that data and correspondence can reach its destination securely. If your files contain personal, and not just commercial, information then you will not want to send your data outside a select few countries.
As a company registered in England and Wales, Excel4Business Ltd has to comply with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) when handling personal data. It is also registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office who uphold the underlying legislation. This is considered a global gold standard but, where US companies need compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), we would expect to sign a separate business agreement to that effect.
Do you need to send commercially sensitive or confidential data to an Excel consultant?
It is often convenient, but not strictly necessary, to share unredacted files with Excel developers. Full disclosure is sometimes necessary for a consultant to fully understand your intentions, and to propose an optimal solution. It can also be necessary if you want a competitive, fixed price quote for a job. If consultants are left to guess the nature of your data, they may be forced to quote based on an under- or over-engineered solution (depending on your preference).
If you want to remove commercially sensitive data from your spreadsheet then the simplest is option is to remove it entirely. If you want to create a monthly sales report, it may not matter which clients made the biggest purchases. You may simply be interested in the number of orders and the sales of different product lines. An Excel consultant can work a file containing a blank column as long as you’re happy to copy and real data back into the final file. The data structure is critical, the data often less so.
If you want the report to show your biggest clients each month then an expert may have some follow-up questions depending on the outputs required. If you need a pie chart, they will want to ensure all chart elements remain readable. It can be useful to have an idea how big each slice will be, and whether names can be abbreviated. However, there is still no need for the client list to be shared.
When it comes to columns of dates or numbers, it is generally best to provide them in full. Datasets frequently contain oddities. A sales list can include refunds. Some orders may not be assigned dates. If your data contains thousands of rows populated elsewhere in the organisation, you may not be aware of these problems. That leaves a consultant with the option of quoting high to cover the risk, or quoting low and specifying the source data must be perfect.
The alternative is for you to supply dummy data. It can be time-consuming to come up with a new list of figures that is genuinely representative of real figures. One option is to multiply all your figures by a fixed amount using a paste special operation, and then to sort the figures independent of the other columns in your table. This will preserve any distributional features in your data and are transformations that can be made very quickly. Another option is to cut your dataset in half. Any solution that works for 5,000 rows of data should work for 10,000 rows of data. At Excel4Business, we can advise on a method appropriate to your data.
Do you need to send personal data to an Excel consultant?
As personally identifiable data is not typically used in reports or presentations, it is rarely necessary to send personal information to an Excel consultant for them to build a solution. A lot of personal data such as names, e-mails, phones and social security numbers follow standard formats so an experienced consultant will be able to ensure there is sufficient space in any forms or columns to display the data properly.
There are exceptions. One of our clients was using Excel to produce a printable address book of residents on a managed estate. The raw data for the address book was coming from an online system and needed entries for each resident, sorted alphabetically or by road name, with multiple columns per page. To attempt the exercise with dummy data would have been extremely time consuming and may have missed crucial details such as the presence of some businesses in the database. If the primary reason for employing an Excel consultant is to process personal data then it is best to share the personal data.
Personal information is sometimes combined with dates and numbers such as in shift schedulers or pay calculators. It should be possible to build a shift scheduler without an Excel consultant having to see anyone’s real-life availability. However, once in use, it may not be practical to upgrade the solution without working on live data. There may also be bugs that arise with real-life data. If you wanted to send employees their shift schedules in PDF files named after them, that might cause issues if their names contained apostrophes like in O’Neill. An experienced expert may anticipate common problems but there is always the risk your data contains something new.
If you want to remove personal data from an Excel file, it is generally a quick process because personal data normally appears in dedicated table columns that aren’t driving any formulas in the spreadsheet.
How do I password protect my files when sending them to you?
You can password protect a single Excel file from the Tools->General Options sub menu in Window’s pop-up save box. You can then attach the file to an e-mail. Do not send the password in the same e-mail. It is best to send the password through a separate channel; sharing in a phone call works very well. If you have multiple files, or your files are basic text exports from databases, then you would ideally combine all the files into a single folder, zip it up and password protect the zip file using a tool like 7-Zip.
Most enterprises will have some sort of solution available to general users. However, Excel4Business does work with individuals who have neither the administrative permissions to install appropriate software on their devices nor any appropriate software on their machines. Such corner cases are rare because Office products allow password protection, as do licensed copies of Adobe Acrobat, and most text data is best pulled into Excel using PowerQuery.
If you wish to retain password protection in all transmitted files, you can open any raw text files used in Microsoft Excel and save them in the Excel format. If there are subsequent issues with automating the step of opening the raw text files, this can be worked on by a consultant taking control of a machine on the corporate network. Opening a file and arranging the data into sensible columns is typically a single line of code so a consultant can develop that aspect of a solution in a call or similar.
Can you develop a spreadsheet remotely by logging in to my machine?
It is possible to work remotely on your corporate network, either through screen sharing software, or through a dedicated user account on a virtual machine. Both approaches can suffer from latency as keystrokes get sent across the world on fibre optic cables. This sluggishness can significantly increase development time. If you want a consultant to work directly on your machine through your user account, it stops you using the machine at the same time and corporate security policies would expect you to supervise such work.
The expectation should be that you will be unable to work while a consultant works on your machine through tools like Quick Assist or Microsoft Teams. It is best reserved for situations where you need to demonstrate an environment-specific issue to an expert, and they are able to fix the issue immediately with a few lines of code.
If a consultant has been developing a file with redacted or dummy data, there may be issues when you put real data in the spreadsheet. As it would not make sense for you to start sending out sensitive information at a late stage in a project, bugs should be fixed by remote log-in. Assuming the issue lies in the confidential data, it may be unavoidable for a consultant to see some sensitive information, but it does avoid information being copied onto our e-mail servers.
Note this technique relies on being able to schedule a meeting with an Excel consultant at a convenient time. If you expect a consultant to develop a solution remotely and do not wish to send across real data, their location becomes a factor in whether they will be able to support the solution. Excel4Business matches clients and consultants on that basis.
The alternative method of giving consultants their own virtual machine is generally awkward to co-ordinate and, from a data security perspective, could result in sharing a lot more files than strictly required. It is best reserved for situations where technically necessary such as the development of solutions with Office Scripts or solutions where live Power Query connections are required.
By Ed Bolton, founder of Excel4Business Ltd. Last reviewed October 2026.