Suppose that your boss wants you to protect an entire workbook, but also wants to be able to change a few cells after you enable protection on the workbook. Before you enabled password protection, you had unlocked some cells in the workbook. Now that your boss is done with the workbook, you can lock these cells.
Follow these steps to lock cells in a worksheet:
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Select the cells you want to lock.
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On the Home tab, in the Alignment group, click the small arrow to open the Format Cells popup window.
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On the Protection tab, select the Locked check box, and then click OK to close the popup.
Note: If you try these steps on a workbook or worksheet you haven’t protected, you’ll see the cells are already locked. This means that the cells are ready to be locked when you protect the workbook or worksheet.
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On the Review tab in the ribbon, in the Changes group, select either Protect Sheet or Protect Workbook, and then reapply protection. See Protect a worksheet or Protect a workbook.
Tip: It’s a best practice to unlock any cells that you may want to change before you protect a worksheet or a workbook, but you can also unlock them after you apply protection. To remove protection, simply remove the password.
In addition to protecting workbooks and worksheets, you can also protect formulas.
Excel for the web can’t lock cells or specific areas of a worksheet.
If you want to lock cells or protect specific areas, click Open in Excel and lock cells to protect them or lock or unlock specific areas of a protected worksheet.
When it comes time to send your Excel spreadsheet, it’s important to protect the data that you’re sharing. You might want to share your data, but that doesn’t mean it should be changed by someone else.
Spreadsheets often contain essential data that shouldn’t be modified or removed by the recipient. Luckily, Excel has built-in features to protect your spreadsheets.
In this tutorial, I’ll help you make sure that your Excel workbooks maintain data integrity. Here are three key techniques you’ll learn in this tutorial:
- Password protect entire workbooks to prevent them from being opened by unauthorized users.
- Protect individual sheets and the workbook structure, to prevent the insertion or deletion of sheets in the workbook.
- Protect cells, to specifically allow or disallow changes to key cells or formulas in your Excel spreadsheets.
Even users with the best intentions may accidentally break an important or complex formula. The best thing to do is remove the option to change your spreadsheets altogether.
How to Protect Excel: Cells, Sheets, & Workbooks (Watch & Learn)
In the screencast below, you’ll see me work through several important types of protection in Excel. We’ll protect an entire workbook, a single spreadsheet, and more.
Want a step-by-step walkthrough? Check out my steps below to find out how to use these techniques. You’ll learn how to protect your workbook in Excel, as well as protecting individual worksheets, cells, and how to work with advanced settings.
We start with broader worksheet protections, then work down to narrower targeted protections you can apply in Excel. Let’s get started learning how to protect your spreadsheet data:
1. Password Protect an Excel Workbook File
Let’s start off by protecting an entire Excel file (or workbook) with a password to prevent others from opening it.
This is a breeze to do. While working in Excel, navigate to the File tab choose the Info tab. Click on the Protect Workbook dropdown option and choose Encrypt with Password.
As is the case with any password, choose a strong and secure combination of letters, numbers, and characters, bearing in mind that passwords are case-sensitive.
It’s important to note that Microsoft has really beefed up the seriousness of their password protection in Excel. In prior versions, there were easy workarounds to bypass password protection of Excel workbooks, but not in newer versions.
In Excel 2013 and beyond, the password implementation will prevent these traditional methods to bypass it. Make sure that you store your passwords carefully and safely or you risk permanently losing access to your crucial workbooks.
Excel Workbook — Mark as Final
If you want to be a bit less forceful with your spreadsheets, consider using the Mark as Final feature. When you mark an Excel file as the final version, it switches the file to read-only mode, and the user will have to re-enable editing.
To change a file to read-only mode, return to the File > Info button, and click on Protect Workbook again. Click on Mark as Final and confirm that you want to mark the document as a final version.
Marking a file as the final version will add a soft warning to the top of the file. Anyone who opens the file after it has been marked as final will see a notice, warning them that the file is finalized.
Marking a file as the final version is a less formal way of signaling that a file shouldn’t be changed further. The recipient still has the ability to click Edit Anyway and modify the spreadsheet. Marking a file as the final edition is more like a suggestion, but it’s a great approach if you trust the other file users.
2. Password Protect Your Excel Sheet Structure
Next up, let’s learn how to protect the structure of an Excel workbook. This option will ensure that no sheets are deleted, added, or re-arranged inside of the workbook.
If you want everyone to be able to access the workbook, but limit the changes they can make to a file, this is a great start. This protects the structure of the workbook, and limits how the user can change the sheets inside of it.
To turn on this protection, go to the Review tab on Excel’s ribbon and click on Protect Workbook.
Once this option is turned on, the following will go into effect:
- No new sheets can be added to the workbook.
- No sheets can be deleted from the workbook.
- Sheets can no longer be hidden or unhidden from the user’s view.
- The user can no longer drag and drop the sheet tabs to reorder them in the workbook.
Of course, trusted users can be given the password to unprotect the workbook and modify it. To unprotect a workbook, simply click on the Protect Workbook button again and input the password to unprotect the Excel workbook.
3. How to Protect Cells in Excel
Now, let’s get down to really detailed methods for protecting a spreadsheet. So far, we’ve been password protecting an entire workbook or the structure of an Excel file. In this section, we dig into how to protect your cells in Excel with specific settings you can apply. We cover how to allow or block certain types of changes to be made to parts of your spreadsheet.
To get started, find Excel’s Review tab, and click on Protect Sheet. On the pop-up window, you’ll see a huge set of options. This window allows you to fine-tune how you want to protect the cells in your Excel spreadsheet. For now, let’s leave the settings at their default.
This option allows for very specific protections of your spreadsheet. By default, the options will almost totally lock down the spreadsheet. Let’s add a password so that the sheet is protected. If you press OK at this point, let’s see what happens when you attempt to change a cell.
Excel throws off an error that the cell is protected, which is exactly what we wanted.
Basically, this option is crucial if you want to ensure that your spreadsheet isn’t changed by others who have access to the file. Using the protect sheet feature is a way that you can selectively protect the spreadsheet.
To unprotect the sheet, simply click on the Protect Sheet button and re-enter the password to remove the protections added to the sheet.
Specific Protections in Excel
Let’s take a second look at the options that show when you start to protect a sheet in Excel workbooks.
The Protect Sheet menu lets you refine the options for sheet protection. Each of the boxes on this menu lets the user change slightly more inside of a protected worksheet.
To remove a protection, check the respective box in the list. For example, you could allow the spreadsheet user to Format cells by checking the corresponding box.
Here are two ideas on how you could selectively allow the user to change the spreadsheet:
- Check the Format cells, columns, and rows boxes to let the user change the visual appearance of cells without modifying the original data.
- Insert columns and rows could be checked so that the user can add more data, while protecting the original cells.
The important box to leave checked is the Protect worksheet and contents of locked cells box. This protects the data inside of cells.
When you’re working with crucial financial data or formulas that will be used in making decisions, you have to maintain control of the data and ensure that it doesn’t change. Using these types of targeted protections is an important Excel skill to master.
Recap and Keep Learning More About Excel
Locking up a spreadsheet before you send it is crucial to protecting your valuable data and making sure that it’s not misused. The tips I shared in this tutorial help you maintain control of that data even after your Excel spreadsheet is forwarded and shared.
All of these tips are additional tools and steps to becoming an advanced Excel user. Protecting your workbooks is a specific skill, but there are lots of ways to improve your performance. As always, there’s room to grow your Excel skills further. Here are some helpful Excel tutorials with important skills to master next:
- PivotTables are a great tool for working with spreadsheet data. Here’s 5 Advanced Excel Pivot Table Techniques to learn now.
- ExcelZoo has a listing of additional tutorials for protecting your workbooks, sheets, and cells.
- Condition formatting changes how a cell looks based on what’s inside of it. Here’s a comprehensive Excel tutorial on How to Use Conditional Formatting.
How do you protect your important business data when sharing it? Let me know in the comments section if you use these protection tools or others I may not know about.
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I believe that life is too short to do just one thing. In college, I studied Accounting and Finance but continue to scratch my creative itch with my work for Envato Tuts+ and other clients. By day, I enjoy my career in corporate finance, using data and analysis to make decisions.
I cover a variety of topics for Tuts+, including photo editing software like Adobe Lightroom, PowerPoint, Keynote, and more. What I enjoy most is teaching people to use software to solve everyday problems, excel in their career, and complete work efficiently. Feel free to reach out to me on my website.
Data in Excel can be protected from extraneous interference. This is important, because sometimes you spend a lot of time and effort creating a pivot table or a large array, and another person accidentally or intentionally changes or completely deletes all your work.
Let’s consider the ways of protecting an Excel document and its single elements.
Protection of Excel cells from changing
How to put protection on a cell in Excel? By default, all cells in Excel are protected (locked). It’s easy to check: right-click on any cell, select «Format Cells» – «Protection». We can see that the check box on the «Locked» item is selected. But this does not mean that they are protected from changes.
Why do we need this information? The thing is that Excel doesn’t provide the function allowing you to protect a single cell. We can enable protection of the worksheet, and then all the cells on it will be protected from editing and other interference. On the one hand, it is convenient, but what if we don’t need to protect all the cells, but only some of them?
Let’s consider an example. We have a simple spreadsheet with data. We need to send this spreadsheet to branch stores, so that the stores could fill in the «SOLD QUANTITY» column and send it back. To avoid making any changes to other cells, let’s protect them.
First, remove protection from those cells to which employees of branch stores will make changes. Select C3: D7, right-click to open the menu, select «Format Cells» and remove the check box from «Locked».
Now select «REVIEW» – «Changes» — «Protect Sheet» tab. A window appears with 2 check boxes selected. Clear the first one, to exclude any interference of branch stores’ employees, except for filling «SOLD QUANTITY» column. Come up with a password and click OK.
Warning! Do not forget your password!
Now other people can only enter some value in C3: D7 range. Since we have limited all other actions, no one can even change the background color. All the formatting tools on the top toolbar aren’t active, that is, they do not work.
Protection of an Excel workbook from editing
If several people work on one computer, it is advisable to protect their documents from editing by third parties. It is possible to put protection not only on separate worksheets, but also on the whole workbook.
When the workbook is protected, outsiders can open the document, see the written data, but they cannot rename the sheets, insert a new one, change their location, etc. Let’s have a try.
Save the previous formatting. That is, you still can make changes only in «SOLD QUANTITY» column. To protect the workbook completely, select «REVIEW» – «Changes» — «Protect Workbook» tab. Click the check box opposite «Structure» item and come up with a password.
Now, if we try to rename the worksheet, we will not succeed. All commands are gray-colored: they don’t work.
The protection from the worksheet and the workbook is removed with the same buttons. When removing, the system will require the same password.
Bottom Line: Learn how to lock individual cells or ranges in Excel so that users cannot change the formulas or contents of protected cells. Plus a few bonus tips to save time with the setup.
Skill Level: Beginner
Video Tutorial
Download the Excel File
You can download the file that I use in the video tutorial by clicking below.
Protecting Your Work from Unwanted Changes
If you share your spreadsheets with other users, you’ve probably found that there are specific cells you don’t want them to modify. This is especially true for cells that contain formulas and special formatting.
The great news is that you can lock or unlock any cell, or a whole range of cells, to keep your work protected. It’s easy to do, and it involves two basic steps:
- Locking/unlocking the cells.
- Protecting the worksheet.
Here’s how to prevent users from changing some cells.
Step 1: Lock and Unlock Specific Cells or Ranges
Right-click on the cell or range you want to change, and choose Format Cells from the menu that appears.
This will bring up the Format Cells window (keyboard shortcut for this window is Ctrl + 1.). Choose the tab that says Protection.
Next, make sure that the Locked option is checked.
Locked is the default setting for all cells in a new worksheet/workbook.
Once we protect the worksheet (in the next step) those locked cells will not be able to be altered by users.
If you want users to be able to edit a particular cell or range, uncheck the Locked box so they are unlocked. Since cells are locked by default, most of the job will be going through the sheet and unlocking cells that can be edited by users.
I share some shortcuts to make this process faster in the Bonus section below.
Step 2: Protect the Worksheet
Now that you’ve locked/unlocked the cells that you want users to be able to edit, you want to protect the sheet. Once you protect the sheet, users cannot change the locked cells. However, they can still modify the unlocked cells.
To protect the sheet, simply right-click on the tab at the bottom of the sheet, and choose Protect Sheet… from the menu.
This will bring up the Protect Sheet window. If you want your sheet to be password protected, you have the option of entering a password here. Adding a password is optional. Click OK.
If you’ve chosen to enter a password, then you will be prompted to verify your entry after you’ve clicked OK.
With the sheet protected, users will be unable to change the cells that are locked. If they try to make changes, they will get an error/warning message that looks like this.
You can unprotect the sheet in the same way that you protected it, by right-clicking on the sheet tab. An alternative way to protect and unprotect sheets is by using the Protect Sheet button in the Review tab of the Ribbon.
The button text displays the opposite of the current state. It says Protect Sheet when the sheet is unprotected, and Unprotect Sheet when it is protected.
It’s important to note that all cells can be edited when the sheet is unprotected. After making changes you must protect the sheet again and Save the workbook before sending or sharing with other users.
3 Bonus Tips for Locking Cells and Protecting Sheets
As you can see, it is fairly simple to protect your formulas and formatting from being changed! But I’d like to leave you with three tips to help make it faster & easier for both you and your users.
1. Prevent Locked Cells From Being Selected
This tip will help make it faster and easier for your users to input data in the sheet.
Turning off the Select locked cells option prevents the locked cells from being selected with either the mouse or keyboard (arrow or tab keys). This means users will only be able to select the unlocked cells that they need to edit. They can quickly hit the Tab, Enter, or arrow keys to move to the next editable cell.
To make this change, you just uncheck the option that says “Select locked cells” on the Protect Sheet window.
After pressing OK, you will only be able to select the unlocked cells.
2. Add a button for locking cells to the Quick Access Toolbar
This allows you to quickly see the locked setting for a cell or range.
From the Home tab on the Ribbon, you can open the drop-down menu under the Format button and see the option to Lock Cell.
If you right-click on the Lock Cell option, another menu appears giving you the option to add the button to the Quick Access Toolbar.
When you select this option, the button will be added to the Quick Access Toolbar at the top of the workbook. This button will remain each time you use Excel. You can easily lock and unlock specific cells on your sheet by clicking on this button.
You can also see if the active cell locked or unlocked. The button will have a dark background if the selection is locked.
It’s important to note that this only shows the locked state of the active cell. If you have multiple cells selected, the active cell is the cell you selected first and appears with no fill shading.
Mixed Lock State
If you select a range that contains both locked and unlocked cells, you will see a solid box for the Locked checkbox in the Format Cells window. This denotes the mixed state.
You can click the checkbox to lock or unlock ALL cells in the selected range.
3. Use different formatting for locked cells
By changing the formatting of cells that are locked, you give your users a visual clue that those cells are off limits. In this example the locked cells have a gray fill color. The unlocked (editable) cells are white. You can also provide a guide on the sheet or instructions tab.
You might be wondering where I found this template for a quote. I got it from the template library. You can access the library by going to the File tab, choosing New, and using the search word “quote.”
You can find all sorts of useful templates there, including invoices, calendars, to-do lists, budgets, and more.
Conclusion
By locking your cells and protecting your sheet, you can keep your formulas safe from tampering by other users, and prevent mistakes.
I hope this simple tutorial proves helpful to you. Please leave a comment below if you have any tips or questions about locking cells, protecting sheets with passwords, or preventing users from changing cells.
Thank you! 🙂
Lock All Cells | Lock Specific Cells | Lock Formula Cells
You can lock cells in Excel if you want to protect cells from being edited.
Lock All Cells
By default, all cells are locked. However, locking cells has no effect until you protect the worksheet.
1. Select all cells.
2. Right click, and then click Format Cells (or press CTRL + 1).
3. On the Protection tab, you can verify that all cells are locked by default.
4. Click OK or Cancel.
5. Protect the sheet.
All cells are locked now. To unprotect a worksheet, right click on the worksheet tab and click Unprotect Sheet. The password for the downloadable Excel file is «easy».
Lock Specific Cells
To lock specific cells in Excel, first unlock all cells. Next, lock specific cells. Finally, protect the sheet.
1. Select all cells.
2. Right click, and then click Format Cells (or press CTRL + 1).
3. On the Protection tab, uncheck the Locked check box and click OK.
4. For example, select cell A1 and cell A2.
5. Right click, and then click Format Cells (or press CTRL + 1).
6. On the Protection tab, check the Locked check box and click OK.
Again, locking cells has no effect until you protect the worksheet.
7. Protect the sheet.
Cell A1 and cell A2 are locked now. To edit these cells, you have to unprotect the sheet. The password for the downloadable Excel file is «easy». You can still edit all other cells.
Lock Formula Cells
To lock all cells that contain formulas, first unlock all cells. Next, lock all formula cells. Finally, protect the sheet.
1. Select all cells.
2. Right click, and then click Format Cells (or press CTRL + 1).
3. On the Protection tab, uncheck the Locked check box and click OK.
4. On the Home tab, in the Editing group, click Find & Select.
5. Click Go To Special.
6. Select Formulas and click OK.
Excel selects all formula cells.
7. Press CTRL + 1.
8. On the Protection tab, check the Locked check box and click OK.
Note: if you also check the Hidden check box, users cannot see the formula in the formula bar when they select cell A2, B2, C2 or D2.
Again, locking cells has no effect until you protect the worksheet.
9. Protect the sheet.
All formula cells are locked now. To edit these cells, you have to unprotect the sheet. The password for the downloadable Excel file is «easy». You can still edit all other cells.