In our technologically advanced world, knowing how to use EXCEL sheets have become a necessity. Starting from schools & colleges to offices it is extremely useful for collection & handling of data. Today in this article we are going to learn how to prevent someone from copying the cells from your worksheet or in other words how to protect my entire sheet or selected cells in my sheet. We will be learning in details the following topics:
- How to protect your sheet?
- How to unprotect your sheet?
- How to unlock a few cells in your sheet?
- How to lock a few cells in your sheet?
So, let’s start with the first one. How do I protect my sheet? But before that we must know, why do I need to protect my sheet or rather what are its advantages?
Basically, when you are protecting your sheet, you are restricting anyone or everyone from making any changes in the sheet whether intentionally or not. You are preventing anyone from copying anything from the sheet. Only people having the password can unprotect the sheet and make changes to the sheet.
- HOW TO PROTECT MY SHEET IN EXCEL?
Now imagine you are a teacher and you have stored the data of the marks obtained by the students in an exam in an excel sheet. You want the students to see their acquired marks in that excel and NOT make any changes in the sheet. This is when you need to protect your sheet. Here below is a step-wise guide to how you can protect your sheet.
Here is the sheet that you want to protect.
STEP 1: Right click on your sheet. In the panel below you can see there is “Sheet1” written in green. The name of your sheet will appear there (whatever you have renamed your sheet as). Right click on that.
STEP 2: You can see a lot of options and from that you must click on ‘Protect Sheet’.
STEP 3: Now the sheet will ask for a password. Enter the password with which you want to protect the sheet. You will see that there are two checkboxes which are automatically ticked for you. Leave it as it is, we will come to that later in this article.
Click on ‘OK’ once you have entered the password.
STEP 4: Re-enter your password and click on ‘OK’.
You are all done! If you want to check if your sheet has been protected or not, just click on any cell. You will see a pop-up window appears on the screen which says “The cell or chart you’re trying to change is on a protected sheet. To make a change, unprotect the sheet. You might be requested to enter a password.”
Kudos to you! You have successfully protected your sheet!
Now if you want to add anything in the sheet or want to make any changes you will have to unprotect the sheet.
- HOW TO UNPROTECT YOUR SHEET IN EXCEL?
Here is a step-wise guide to how you can unprotect your sheet.
STEP 1: Right click on your sheet (‘Sheet1’ here) and click on ‘Unprotect sheet’.
STEP 2: Enter the password with which you have protected the sheet and click on ‘OK’.
And DONE! Now you can again edit the sheet and make any changes you want.
Let’s move on to the 3rd topic now.
- HOW TO UNLOCK CELLS IN YOUR SHEET?
Imagine, in the demo sheet you want to take some data from the students. For example, you want to know the blood groups of the students and so you add another column to the sheet for the students to fill in their blood groups. However, you want the students to just enter their blood groups without altering any of the information already mentioned in the sheet. This is when you need locking and unlocking of cells. With the help of locking and unlocking of cells you can give access to the editor to make changes only in your desired cells (each of the rectangle like boxes are called cells in which you type something or enter your data).
This is our demo sheet now.
Here is a step-wise guide on how to unlock a few cells in your excel sheet and keep the rest of the cells locked.
STEP 1: Unprotect the sheet if it’s already protected (following the steps given above).
STEP 2: Select the cells you want to give access for data entry or editing.
STEP 3: Right click on them and select ‘Format cells’ option.
STEP 4: Under the ‘Protection’ tab in the pop up window you will see the ‘Locked’ option which is already enabled. You need to uncheck this box and then click on ‘OK’.
STEP 5: Protect the sheet following the steps already mentioned before in this article.
After you are done, you can see that when you are trying to edit the unlocked cells you are able to make changes in these cells. However, if you try to access any other cell in the sheet, a pop-up window will appear on the screen which will say “The cell or chart you’re trying to change is on a protected sheet. To make a change, unprotect the sheet. You might be requested to enter a password.”
Now what about the reverse? What would you do if you want to lock particular cells and leave all the rest of the cells in the sheet accessible to the editor?
That brings us to the 4th & final topic of this article.
- HOW TO LOCK CELLS IN YOUR SHEET?
In our demo sheet, we want to lock the cells containing the name & marks obtained by the students and leave the rest of the cells editable.
Here is a step-wise guide on how to lock a few cells in your excel sheet.
STEP 1: Unprotect the sheet if it’s already protected (following the steps given above).
STEP 2: Select the entire sheet by clicking on the element at the top left corner of the sheet (above row ‘1’ and on the left of column ‘A’).
Step 3: Right click on the sheet and select format cells.
STEP 4: Uncheck the ‘Locked’ box and click on ‘OK’.
STEP 5: Select the cells you want to lock.
STEP 6 : Right click on them and select format cells.
STEP 7: Enable the ‘Locked’ option by clicking on the checkbox. Then click on ‘OK’.
STEP 8: Repeat this process for the marks obtained column or the other cells you want to keep locked. Then Protect the sheet (using the steps already mentioned above).
Now you can see that you are able to edit all the cells in the sheet except the ones you have locked.
So in this article we learnt how to protect & unprotect an excel sheet and how to lock & unlock a few cells in an excel sheet while keeping the rest of the cells unlocked & locked respectively.
