Excel formula-based function for SHA256 / SHA512 hashing without VBA or macros

Question

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/

Solution

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

Comments

[JKVeganAbroad]

Thank you @PGSystemTester ! This is amazing, it even works on my iPhone! Sorry I took so long to thank you 😔

[mindmischief]

This method doesn't populate down a column as it's designed. How would that be done?

[pgSystemTester]

@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: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/… Note there are much better methods of doing this if you're trying to do some cracking of some kind.