Excel vba lock range

Excel — Lock Range of Cells Based on Values

Is it possible to lock a particular range of cells based on the input from a dropdown in a row of data?

For example, each row of my spreadsheet represents a patient, and the first cell asks a question, to which a «Yes» or «No» response is required (which is selected/entered via a dropdown).

EDIT

The «Yes/No» cell is, in fact, a merge of two cells (G13 & H13). I have updated my example to reflect this.

EDIT ENDS

If the user selects «No», then I wish to lock the remainder of the range of questions (G13-H13:AB13) as there is no need to enter data here. However, if the user selects, «Yes», then the remainder of the cells shall remain available to enter data into.

All cells within each range have data entered via dropdowns only.

Here is what I am hoping to achieve:

Once again, I would like to emphasize that all data is entered via dropdown menus and that nothing is to be typed in manually; I would like it so that if G13-H13 = «No» , then the remainder of the cells within the range which have dropdowns are blocked or locked from having further information selected from their respective dropdowns.

Please note that the value in G13-H13 can be either «Yes» or «No».

Can this be achieved using VBA and if so, how?

3 Answers 3

EDIT: You can do this without VBA. I based this on another answer here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/11954076/138938

Column G has the Yes or No drop-down.

In cell H13, set up data validation like this:

1. Data —> Data Validation
2. Select List in the Allow drop-down.
3. Enter this formula in the Source field: =IF($G13=»Yes», MyList, FALSE)
4. Copy cell H13 and paste the validation (paste —> pastespecial —> validation) to cells I13:AB13.
5. Replace MyList in the formula with the list you want to allow the user to select from for each column. Note that you’ll need to have the patient answer set to «Yes» in order to set up the validation. Once you set it up, you can delete it or set it to No.
6. Once you have the validation set up for row 13, copy and paste the validation to all rows that need it.

If you want to use VBA, use the following, and use the worksheet_change event or some other mechanism to trigger the LockOrUnlockPatientCells. I don’t like using worksheet_change, but it may make sense in this case.

In order for the cells to be locked, you need to lock them and then protect the sheet. The code below does that. You need to pass it the row for the patient that is being worked on.

You can test the functionality by using the following, manually adjusting the values for the patient row. Once you get it to work the way you want, get the row from the user’s input.

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Lock certain cells in a range

I’m trying to loop through a range of cells, locking any cell that has content while leaving empty cells unlocked.

When I run the below code the result is the entire sheet is locked. If I add an else statement the sheet is unlocked. Basically whatever the last .locked = (true, false) statement is is how the entire sheet winds up.

Change 1 Is it possible that I have some setting on/off that is interfering since I’m the only one who is unable to get any of this to work?

7 Answers 7

You can try this.

If you say Range(«A1»).Select, then it locks only A1. You can specify multiple cells to be locked by specifying as follows:
A3:A12,D3:E12,J1:R13,W18
This locks A3 to A12 and D3 to E12 etc.

I may be missing something but.

. will lock all cells on the active sheet. If you just change it to.

. then it works; I think?! As the range is very small, you may as well not unlock cells at the start, and instead unlock cells whilst locking them e.g.

If you are new to VBA, I would recommend cycling through code line-by-line as described in this Excel consultant’s video. If you step through code, you can check «has cell A7 behaved as expected?». instead of just seeing the end product

A quick way to unlock non-blank cells is to use SpecialCells see below.

On my testing this code handles merged cells ok, I think this is what is generating your error on Tim’s code when it looks to handle each cell individually (which to be clear is not an issue in Tim’s code, it is dealing with an unexpected outcome)

You may also find this article of mine A fast method for determining the unlocked cell range useful

I know this is an old thread, but I’ve been stuck on this for a while too, and after some testing on Excel 2013 here’s what I conclude if your range includes any merged cell

• The merged cells must be entirely included within that range (e.g. the merging must be entirely within the range being lock/unlocked
• The range being merged can be larger, or at least exactly the range corresponding to the merged cells. If it’s a named range that works as well.

Also, you cannot lock/unlock a cell that is already within a protected range. E.g if you run:

Twice it will work the first time, and fail the second time around. So you should unprotect the target range (or the sheet) before.

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How to lock a cell in Excel formula using VBA

Users entering data into the wrong cells or changing existing formulas can make data collection a tedious process. However, you can prevent users from going outside the intended boundaries by disabling certain sections of your workbook. In this article, we’re going to show you how to lock a cell in Excel formula using VBA.

Protection

Worksheets are objects in a workbook’s worksheet collection and they have Protect and Unprotect methods. These methods determine the protected status of a worksheet as the name suggests. Both methods can get accept other optional arguments. The first is the password argument. By setting a string for the parameter argument, you can lock your worksheets with a password. Below is a breakdown.

Lock Cells

Important note: Protecting a sheet does not lock individual cells! The cells you want to lock should be marked as Locked too. A cell can be marked as Locked, and/or Hidden, in two ways:

The User Interface method requires using the Format Cells dialog. Select a cell or a range of cells, and press Ctrl + 1 to open this menu and go to the Protection tab. Use the corresponding checkboxes to activate properties.

The second method is doing this via VBA code. Every cell and range can be made Locked and FormulaHidden properties. Set these two as True or False to change their status.

You can use the Hidden status to hide your formulas as well.

Detect Cells with Formulas

If you just need to lock only cells with formulas, you need to first identify cells that have formulas. The cells and ranges have a HasFormula property, which makes them read only. It returns a Boolean value based on whether the cell or range has a formula. A simple loop can be used to detect cells in a given range that contain formula.

To run this code, you need to add a module into the workbook or the add-in file. Copy and paste the code into the module to run it. The main advantage of the module method is that it allows saving the code in the file, so that it can be used again later. Furthermore, the subroutines in modules can be used by icons in the menu ribbons or keyboard shortcuts. Remember to save your file in either XLSM or XLAM format to save your VBA code.

Lock cells and protect a worksheet

The code example below checks every cell in the range «B4:C9» from the active worksheet. If a cell has a formula, it locks the cell. Otherwise, the cell becomes or remains unlocked.

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Protecting cells in Excel but allow these to be modified by VBA script

I am using Excel where certain fields are allowed for user input and other cells are to be protected. I have used Tools Protect sheet, however after doing this I am not able to change the values in the VBA script. I need to restrict the sheet to stop user input, at the same time allow the VBA code to change the cell values based on certain computations.

6 Answers 6

If the UserInterfaceOnly parameter is set to true, VBA code can modify protected cells.

Note however that this parameter does not stick. It needs to be reapplied each time the file is opened.

You can modify a sheet via code by taking these actions

In code this would be:

The weakness of this method is that if the code is interrupted and error handling does not capture it, the worksheet could be left in an unprotected state.

The code could be improved by taking these actions

The code to do this would be:

This code renews the protection on the worksheet, but with the ‘UserInterfaceOnly’ set to true. This allows VBA code to modify the worksheet, while keeping the worksheet protected from user input via the UI, even if execution is interrupted.

This setting is lost when the workbook is closed and re-opened. The worksheet protection is still maintained.

So the ‘Re-protection’ code needs to be included at the start of any procedure that attempts to modify the worksheet or can just be run once when the workbook is opened.

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VBA protect and unprotect Sheets (25+ examples)

Protecting and unprotecting sheets is a common action for an Excel user. There is nothing worse than when somebody, who doesn’t know what they’re doing, overtypes essential formulas and cell values. It’s even worse when that person happens to be us; all it takes is one accidental keypress, and suddenly the entire worksheet is filled with errors. In this post, we explore using VBA to protect and unprotect sheets.

Protection is not foolproof but prevents accidental alteration by an unknowing user.

Sheet protection is particularly frustrating as it has to be applied one sheet at a time. If we only need to protect a single sheet, that’s fine. But if we have more than 5 sheets, it is going to take a while. This is why so many people turn to a VBA solution.

The VBA Code Snippets below show how to do most activities related to protecting and unprotecting sheets.

Download the example file: Click the link below to download the example file used for this post:

Adapting the code for your purposes

Unless stated otherwise, every example below is based on one specific worksheet. Each code includes Sheets(“Sheet1”)., this means the action will be applied to that specific sheet. For example, the following protects Sheet1.

But there are lots of ways to reference sheets for protecting or unprotecting. Therefore we can change the syntax to use one of the methods shown below.

Using the active sheet

The active sheet is whichever sheet is currently being used within the Excel window.

Applying a sheet to a variable

If we want to apply protection to a sheet stored as a variable, we could use the following.

Later in the post, we look at code examples to loop through each sheet and apply protection quickly.

Protect and unprotect: basic examples

Let’s begin with some simple examples to protect and unprotect sheets in Excel.

Protect a sheet without a password

Unprotect a sheet (no password)

Protecting and unprotecting with a password

Adding a password to give an extra layer of protection is easy enough with VBA. The password in these examples is hardcoded into the macro; this may not be the best for your scenario. It may be better to apply using a string variable, or capturing user passwords with an InputBox.

VBA Protect sheet with password

VBA Unprotect sheet with a password

NOTE – It is not necessary to unprotect, then re-protect a sheet to change the settings. Instead, just protect again with the new settings.

Using a password based on user input

Using a password that is included in the code may partly defeat the benefit of having a password. Therefore, the codes in this section provide examples of using VBA to protect and unprotect based on user input. In both scenarios, clicking Cancel is equivalent to entering no password.

Protect with a user-input password

Unprotect with a user-input password

Catching errors when incorrect password entered

If an incorrect password is provided, the following error message displays.

The code below catches the error and provides a custom message.

If you forget a password, don’t worry, the protection is easy to remove.

Applying protection to different parts of the worksheet

VBA provides the ability to protect 3 aspects of the worksheet:

• Contents – what you see on the grid
• Objects – the shapes and charts which are on the face of the grid
• Scenarios – the scenarios contained in the What If Analysis section of the Ribbon

By default, the standard protect feature will apply all three types of protection at the same time. However, we can be specific about which elements of the worksheet are protected.

Protect contents

Protect objects

Protect scenarios

Protect contents, objects and scenarios

Applying protection to multiple sheets

As we have seen, protection is applied one sheet at a time. Therefore, looping is an excellent way to apply settings to a lot of sheets quickly. The examples in this section don’t just apply to Sheet1, as the previous examples have, but include all worksheets or all selected worksheets.

Protect all worksheets in the active workbook

Protect the selected sheets in the active workbook

Unprotect all sheets in active workbook

Checking if a worksheet is protected

The codes in this section check if each type of protection has been applied.

Check if Sheet contents is protected

Check if Sheet objects are protected

Check if Sheet scenarios are protected

Changing the locked or unlocked status of cells, objects and scenarios

When a sheet is protected, unlocked items can still be edited. The following codes demonstrate how to lock and unlock ranges, cells, charts, shapes and scenarios.

When the sheet is unprotected, the lock setting has no impact. Each object becomes locked on protection.

All the examples in this section set each object/item to lock when protected. To set as unlocked, change the value to False.

Lock a cell

Lock all cells

Lock a chart

Lock a shape

Lock a Scenario

Allowing actions to be performed even when protected

Even when protected, we can allow specific operations, such as inserting rows, formatting cells, sorting, etc. These are the same options as found when manually protecting the sheet.

Allow sheet actions when protected

Allow selection of any cells

Allow selection of unlocked cells

Don’t allow selection of any cells

Allowing VBA code to make changes, even when protected

Even when protected, we still want our macros to make changes to the sheet. The following VBA code changes the setting to allow macros to make changes to a protected sheet.

Unfortunately, this setting is not saved within the workbook. It needs to be run every time the workbook opens. Therefore, calling the code in the Workbook_Open event of the Workbook module is probably the best option.

Allowing the use of the Group and Ungroup feature

To enable users to make use of the Group and Ungroup feature of protected sheets, we need to allow changes to the user interface and enable outlining.

As noted above the UserInterfaceOnly setting is not stored in the workbook; therefore, it needs to be run every time the workbook opens.

Conclusion

Wow! That was a lot of code examples; hopefully, this covers everything you would ever need for using VBA to protect and unprotect sheets.

Related posts:

About the author

Hey, I’m Mark, and I run Excel Off The Grid.

My parents tell me that at the age of 7 I declared I was going to become a qualified accountant. I was either psychic or had no imagination, as that is exactly what happened. However, it wasn’t until I was 35 that my journey really began.

In 2015, I started a new job, for which I was regularly working after 10pm. As a result, I rarely saw my children during the week. So, I started searching for the secrets to automating Excel. I discovered that by building a small number of simple tools, I could combine them together in different ways to automate nearly all my regular tasks. This meant I could work less hours (and I got pay raises!). Today, I teach these techniques to other professionals in our training program so they too can spend less time at work (and more time with their children and doing the things they love).

Do you need help adapting this post to your needs?

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But, if you’re still struggling you should:

1. Read other blogs, or watch YouTube videos on the same topic. You will benefit much more by discovering your own solutions.
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3. Ask a question in a forum like Mr Excel, or the Microsoft Answers Community. Remember, the people on these forums are generally giving their time for free. So take care to craft your question, make sure it’s clear and concise. List all the things you’ve tried, and provide screenshots, code segments and example workbooks.
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