Protecting the Formatting of Shapes in Groups

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When you apply local formatting to a group by clicking a command on the Format menu, you also apply the format to all of the shapes in the group. The formatting applied to the group can overwrite any local formatting of the shapes within the group; if you've used formulas to change the formatting of the component shapes, those formulas are also overwritten. To avoid this effect, you can do the following:

• Protect specific formatting cells with the guard function.
• Lock a group against formatting changes.
• Selectively prohibit application of styles to some or all of the shapes in the group master.

To protect specific formulas from changing when a user locally formats a shape, use the guard function.

You can lock a group against formatting with the LockFormat cell in the Protection section of the group's sheet. This lock prevents a user from applying a style or local format to the group. When a user tries to do so, a message appears indicating that the action isn't allowed.

When you lock a group against formatting, the shapes in the group can still be subselected and individually formatted unless you set the LockFormat cell for individual shapes in the group. You can also selectively lock against formatting in a group when you want to allow users to format some shapes but not others.