How To Lock Cells In Excel [2013, 2016, 2010] With Formula


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If you work on Excel spreadsheets, you must know how to lock Excel Cells, so that no one will be able to tamper with your data when you share that sheet with other people. You work hard on your spreadsheet and someone inadvertently change the cells, then it would be very horrible and time consuming for you. Thankfully, MS Excel lets you lock cells to protect them from being modified. Locking the cells in spreadsheet ensures that anyone who has access to that sheet will not be able to change the data in those specific cells, apart from that area, they can modify data from other parts of the sheet.

how to lock Excel Cells

How To Lock Cells In Excel

You can protect the sheet by setting up a password on the sheet so that only those who have the password could edit in the document, but sometimes, some cells are just too important that even those trusted people must not be able to edit them. For that, you can lock selected cells in excel and give your mind some rest.

How To Lock Specific Cells In Excel

Here are the steps you can follow to protect your spreadsheet ~

  1. In the Menu Ribbon, find the Review Tab and Navigate to it.How To Lock Cells In Excel
  2. Click on the option that says “Protect sheet” and in the window that will pop-up you must enter the password that will be required by the people to edit the document. You can also set the actions that you want to allow other users to be able to do.
  3. After that, click OK for the confirmation and your sheet will be protected.Lock Specific Cells In Excel

If you want to lock specific cells, you ed to unprotect the sheet first. After that follow these steps ~

  1. Make a selection of the cells that you want to be locked.lock selected cells in excel
  2. Right click on the selection you just did, select the option for Format Cells and click on the Protection tab
  3. Uncheck the “Locked” and press OK.lock selected cells in spreadsheet
  4. After you have done the last step, Go to Review and then Protect sheet. After that click OK.

The cells that were selected will be now locked, and the unlocked cells will be editable.

This way, you can share your spreadsheet as much as you like with anyone necessary, and you will not have to worry about them mishandling the data that you had written there, this will ensure the protection of all the data.

For more questions, write to us in the comment section and please do share with your friends.

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