Protecting Excel Worksheets – Sheridan Nurseries Help Center

Protecting Excel Sheets

To prevent other users from accidentally or deliberately changing, moving, or deleting data in a worksheet, you can lock the cells on your Excel worksheet and then protect the sheet with a password. Say you own a worksheet, where you want team members to add data in specific cells only and not be able to modify anything else. With worksheet protection, you can make only certain parts of the sheet editable and users will not be able to modify data in any other region in the sheet.

Note: Make sure you make note of the password you use to password protect the worksheet as this is not managed by IT and is not recoverable, so IT will not be able to help you if you forget it.

Enable worksheet protection

Worksheet protection is a two-step process: the first step is to unlock cells that others can edit, and then you can protect the worksheet with or without a password.

Step 1: Unlock any cells that needs to be editable

In your Excel file, select the worksheet tab that you want to protect.
Select the cells that others can edit.
Right-click anywhere in the sheet and select “Format Cells”, and then go to the “Protection” tab and clear the “Locked” checkbox.

Step 2: Protect the worksheet

Next, select the actions that users should be allowed to take on the sheet, such as insert or delete columns or rows, edit objects, sort, or use AutoFilter, to name a few. Additionally, you can also specify a password to lock your worksheet. A password prevents other people from removing the worksheet protection—it needs to be entered to unprotect the sheet.

Below are the steps to protect your sheet:

Click on the “Review tab”
Click “Protect Sheet”
On the Protect sheet window seen below, ensure that the two checkboxes are selected, you can add more permissions for the users of this file if needed.

You can set a password if you wish to have this sheet password protected, but it is not required. Make note of this password if you do create one as IT or Microsoft have no way of recovering it.

Your sheet is now password protected and the users can only access the cells that you marked as “unlocked”. If you ever wish to modify the locked portions of the file, you can go to the “Review” tab and click on “Unprotect Sheet” to do so.