How to Lock Cells in Excel
How to Lock Cells in Excel
Welcome to Salams!
My name’s Zahi and in this short video tutorial
I’ll show you how to lock cells in an Excel spreadsheet to protect them from overwriting.
Let’s get started!
As you can see there is some data in this table
representing sales made by John, Lucy and Grace within a time span of three months
January, February and March.
The bottom row contains formulas to create the sum of these sales for a particular month.
What we want to do here
is leave the cells containing sales data (those are these cells right over here)
unlocked for editing, so that people could write their own values in these cells,
but, at the same time, lock the cells with formulas, months and names
to make them read-only (or non-editable).
And this is how we do it!
The first step is to check for the option to lock all the cells in the sheet.
You can do so by clicking in the top left-hand corner.
This highlights the whole spreadsheet.
Now right-click, find the Format cells option, and a pop-up window appears.
Check whether the Locked option has been selected on the Protection tab.
Through this all the cells in the sheet can be locked.
Click on OK and we’ll move on to the next step.
How to Select Editable Cells in Locked Spreadsheet
Now we’ll select the cells we do not want to lock
the cells into which people will be able to type their data.
Right-click again, and Format cells option again.
For these cells we will untick the Locked box.
This will leave them editable and people will be able to enter their own data here.
Confirm through the OK button again.
These two steps basically “told” the software first to lock all the cells in the spreadsheet,
and then, in the second step, Excel was “told” which so we want to keep unlocked,
which cells should remain editable.
Well this all leads us to the third and last step
to make the magic work.
To apply the rules that were set earlier, the function “Protect Sheet” must be “activated” or turned on.
This can be done through the Review tab, with this Protect Sheet button.
If you need to, you can set up a password for security reasons.
I’m going to skip the password for now so I’ll only confirm it by clicking on the OK button.
The spreadsheet with the cells as we selected them is now protected.
We can double-check together.
The cells that will contain sales data can be edited, but the formulas,
the rest of the table all the months and the names have been locked set up as “read-only”
so no one can override the information inside them.
How to Unlock Cells in Excel
If you want to undo the protection,
simply, go to Review tab, Unprotect Sheet, and all the cells in the spreadsheet will be open for editing.
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