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6.5. Protect Items in a WorkbookIn Excel, protection means preventing changes to parts of a workbook. You can apply protection to worksheets, charts, ranges, formatting, and window layout. Protection can use a password, or it may omit the password if the protection is intended to prevent accidental changes rather than malicious ones. You can protect multiple items within a workbook and you can use different passwords for each of those items, though that's generally a bad idea. The more passwords you use, the more likely you are to confuse themespecially within a single workbook. It's a good idea to use the same password when protecting multiple items. Note: Protection allows users to read, but not change, parts of a workbook. Protection is applied in different ways to different items within a workbook. 6.5.1. How to do itTo prevent changes to a worksheet:
After a worksheet is protected, you can't change it without unprotecting it first. To unprotect the worksheet, select Tools Protection Unprotect Sheet and enter the password. Worksheet protection applies to all of the locked cells on a worksheet. To allow users to edit some cells on a worksheet while protecting most of the others, take the following steps before protecting the worksheet: Figure 6-8. Protecting a worksheet from changes
You can also selectively protect ranges of cells by user. This lets some users but not others edit selected cells. To protect ranges by user, take the following steps before protecting the worksheet:
Figure 6-13. Users with edit permissions6.5.2. How it worksIn general, you use the preceding procedure to allow some users to edit ranges without the worksheet-level password. In this case, you would select the Allow checkbox in Step 6, enter a password in Step 7, and probably specify the same password to protect the worksheet in Step 8. Then, all other users would have to enter a password before making changes to the range or the rest of the worksheet. If you don't enter a password for the range in Step 7, all users can edit the range. This is equivalent to unlocking the range as described in the previous procedure. You can allow edits for a group of users. In that case, specify the group name in Step 5. For instance WOMBAT1\Administrators allows members of the Administrators group on the machine Wombat1 to edit a range. In all cases, you must protect the worksheet in order for the range-level protections to take effect. |
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