How to Protect Worksheet and Cells in MS Excel 2016?

Sometimes you have to share the Excel sheet with some other users also. Like, you have created an entire years surveillance data of the company and wanted your juniors to mark their remark on it. At the same time, you don’t want your data to be hampered or changed in any way.  Then, you must protect the cells containing the important data. Sometimes you even want to protect the entire sheet from being changed. This article will help you in both situations. Come, let us see How to Protect Worksheet and Cells in MS Excel 2016?

Steps to Protect Worksheet and Cells in MS Excel 2016:

1. Protect a Worksheet
2. Protect Cells in Worksheet

Protect a Worksheet

Step 1: Open an MS Excel worksheet on your screen. Go to Review tab and under Changes group, click on Protect Sheet.

Step 2: A Protect Sheet dialog box will get opened. Here, you have to type the password that will be demanded later, when you will unprotect the sheet. The password is optional, so if you want you can skip typing password. The protection will be applied to all the locked cells in the sheet. By default, all the cells in an Excel sheet are locked. Click OK.

Step 3: Time to check your effort. Try to edit any cells in the sheet, it will pop out the dialog box saying, you are trying to edit the protected sheet.

Protect Cells in Worksheet

Step 4: Now, if you want to allow users, to be able to edit some set of cells in a protected sheet then you have to unlock those cells as the password is applied to all the locked cells of the sheet. For that select the cells you want to unlock, right-click on the selected cells. An option list will pop out, select Format Cells.

Step 5: A Format Cells dialog box will get opened. Click on the Protection tab at the top the dialog box and unmark Locked checkbox and click OK.

Perform step 1 and 2 again to protect the sheet again. But this time, you can observe that the cells that you have unlocked are still editable, and rest are protected from editing.

Step 6: To unprotect the sheet, go back to the Review tab and under Changes group click on ‘Unprotect Sheet’. If you have provided the password while protecting the sheet, it will ask you for the same password to unprotect the sheet.

Thank you. Keep Reading.