Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Advanced Excel – Protecting a Sheet – Excel Tutorial”.
In this short video tutorial, I’m gon na show you an advanced Excel technique called protect sheet, and at this point I hope that you’ve watched my beginners guide to using Excel and also my intermediate excel tips and tricks for the advanced stuff, I’m just creating short videos. So please check out my other excel advanced videos when you have time in this article, though we’re gon na look at how to protect a sheet. So I have here a sample sheet and it’s pretty small, but it’s basically a list of amazing music, some of which you’ve probably heard of and others that are more underground or lesser-known. And if you’re interested in learning about some of this amazing music I’ll put some links in the description below so that you can click and learn about the music that should be world-famous. That isn’t always so anyway, let’s say I’m gon na trust this spreadsheet to someone else, maybe my son or my daughter is gon na go in, and I want them to update the value of my CD collection and, of course this is just a small sample of The collection, but anyway, let’s say I want them occasionally to update the value, the current value of each of these CDs, but I’m afraid that they might accidentally delete some of this data.
This data took me a while to put in there and I want to protect it so that they can only change the current value of each item, but they can’t ruin the whole record. So how would I go about doing this? Well, it’s kind of tricky and you almost have to think backwards in order to figure out how to do this. What you need to do is click and drag to select the cells that I want to be editable. These are the cells that I want to be editable everything else.
I would like to be protected and locked, but these I want to be editable, so I select those cells that range and of course I could go much further as well, and then I go here to the Home tab home ribbon and the font group launch button. Now, honestly, I could have picked any of these launch buttons, but I’m going to click this one, the font launch button and it opens up with some options, one of which is protection, there’s a protection tab. So I click on it and notice that it says that those cells that I’ve selected are locked by default. All cells in Excel are locked, but they don’t seem to be locked.
Do they the reason? Why is because, in order to actually activate this and make them actually be locked, you have to follow these steps that are listed here, but in this case this is the range that I don’t want to be locked. So I’m gon na uncheck that option click, OK and now those are set up to be unlocked. Everything else is set up to be locked so now to actually activate it to put the layer of protection over this sheet, so that indeed these are unlocked and everything else is locked.
What I have to do is one more step. I have to go to the review tab, the changes group and notice that there’s an option to protect the sheet, so just with a click it brings up this option protect the sheet and the contents of locked cells. If I want to, I can password protect this.
So that students or other people can’t just go here to review and unprotect the sheet, I could password protect it. I’M gon na click, OK, and so now it’s protected. This sheet is protected notice. What happens when I try to type over the words New Wave? It doesn’t let me when I try to type over one of the dates it doesn’t. Let me those areas are locked, but the part that I set to be unlocked the value. Let’S say the value goes up on some of these CDs, which often happens.
I can click and change those because those cells, I changed them from being defaulted to locked to be unlocked. So this is a way to protect a sheet that you’re a little concerned that maybe you’re sharing with others and you’re afraid that maybe they’ll change the wrong data accidentally or on purpose. And yet you want them to be able to work in certain areas of the sheet, so thanks for watching. I hope that this is useful to you, please consider connecting with me on my social media platforms such as Pinterest, Twitter and Facebook, and I really hope that you’ll subscribe to my youtube channel for more videos about technology for teachers and students and watch for a new Video at least every Monday, .
