How to Lock Cells in Microsoft Excel

Keep people from fudging your numbers

If you’ve painstakingly created an Excel sheet, you might want to stop others from making changes. You can do this by learning how to lock cells in Microsoft Excel sheets.

In this tutorial, we’ll also show you how to protect sheets and entire workbooks in Excel to stop people from making changes to the entire document, as opposed to a few cells. Along with this, we’ll also cover how to unprotect sheets in Excel.

How to Protect Sheet in Excel to Prevent Editing

You can use the protect worksheet feature to stop people from changing your Excel sheets. To do this, open any Excel workbook and select theReviewtab above the Ribbon menu. The Review tab is located between the Data and View tabs.

To protect a single Excel sheet, clickProtect Sheet, which is located in the Protect section of the Ribbon menu. You can now set a password for the sheet.

The pop-up menu for Protect Sheet allows granular control over Excel features that can be used on the sheet. You can uncheck the features you want to block. To stop people from making changes to cells in your Excel sheet, be sure to uncheck theFormat cellsoption.

TheEdit Objectsoption deserves a special mention here. If you disable it, people will still be able to run macros embedded in your Excel file, but will not be able to delete it. ClickOKwhen you’re done.

This will protect the Excel spreadsheet you’re working on, but if you have a document with multiple sheets, you will have to use a different option to prevent all types of editing.

To stop people from adding, moving, or deleting sheets in your Excel workbook, go to theReviewtab and clickProtectWorkbook. You’ll see a popup titledProtect Structure and Windows. Add a password to stop people from making changes easily, and selectOKwhen you’re done.

Lock Specific Cells in an Excel Sheet

To lock specific cells in an Excel sheet, open the spreadsheet and pressCtrl+Aon Windows orCommand+Aon Mac to select all cells. Then, pressCtrl+1on Windows orCommand+1on Mac to open the Format Cells window. You can also open this pop-up by pressingCtrl+Shift+Fon Windows or by using theCommand+Shift+Fkeyboard shortcut on Mac.

If you’re having issues with your keyboard, select theHometab above the Ribbon menu and press the arrow icon in the bottom-right corner of theFontsection. You may also right-click any cell and selectFormat Cells.

Select theProtectiontab, uncheck theLockedcheck box, and selectOK.

Now you should find & select the cells or range of cells that you want to lock. Once you’ve done that, pressCtrl+1again, and go to theProtectiontab. Check theLockedcheck box and clickOK. This will lock specific cells in Microsoft Excel, but there’s one more step before you can stop others from editing these cells.

Click theReviewtab and select theProtect Sheetoption. Add a password here, and go through the list of options in the pop-up. Uncheck everything you want to block, and then selectOK. Confirm your password and selectOKagain.

This will block specific cells in Microsoft Excel. You will be able to edit unlocked cells in the Excel file, but not the ones you’ve locked. Remember that if you’ve applied conditional formatting before protecting the sheet, the formatting will continue to trigger as expected even if some cells are locked.

How To Lock a Range of Cells in Excel

You can also allow people to use a password to edit a specific range of cells in your Excel worksheet. This lets you set a separate password to protect the Excel sheet and a second password for each range of cells you want people to edit.

When people edit cells in your sheet, they will not have to unprotect the entire document. This will allow you to lock formula cells and only allow people to use a password to modify cells where data input is necessary.

To do this, open a spreadsheet and select formulas in the document, or select entirerowsor columns. Now go to theReviewtab and selectAllow Edit Ranges.

In the Allow Users to Edit Ranges pop-up, clickNew. This will open a New Ranges pop-up that has all the cells you’ve selected.

Give this a title to make it easy to find, such as Locked Data Input Cells. Enter a password for the range of cells, clickOK, and confirm the password. Finally, use theProtect Sheetfeature to lock the sheet. You’ll now be able to use this password to edit the range of cells that you just defined.

Keep Learning and Exploring Microsoft Excel

Now that you’ve learned how to lock cells in Microsoft Excel, you should keep exploring the app to know it inside out.

It’s never too late to start learning the basics. You can also check out how tocompare two different Excel files and highlight the differencesbetween those.

Pranay is a freelance tech writer based in Mumbai, India. He specializes in writing tech tutorials and features. He’s always looking to buy expensive gadgets that he probably doesn’t need, and tries to justify these purchases by writing tutorials to help others make the most of these products. Pranay specializes in writing about the Apple ecosystem, Windows, and the Internet. He’s been a journalist for over a decade and takes pride in his ability to make tech products and services more useful to everyone through his writing.Read Pranay’s Full Bio

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