Protecting Cells From Modification

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Protecting Cells From Modification

You can protect any and all cells in a spreadsheet from being modified in any way. When someone clicks a protected cell, the program displays a message saying that the cell can't be modified.

Cell protection is useful when you want to protect calculated amounts, protect cells containing formulas you painstakingly created, or to help guide data entry. In short, cell protection helps make your spreadsheets dummy -proof.

There are two aspects to the cell protection process, as illustrated in Figure 22-1. First, each cell has a "Protected" option you can select or deselect. Second, you must turn cell protection on from the Calc menu, which protects all cells that have their Protected option selected.

Figure 22-1. The two aspects of cell protection

By default, all cells in a spreadsheet have the Protected option selected. Because you may want to protect only a handful of cells, you may find it easier to turn cell protection off for all cells, then go back and select only the cells you want to protect. This procedure guides you through this process.

The procedure assumes that the cells you want to protect already contain the data you want in them and are formatted the way you want them.

1. Click the gray box above row 1 and left of column A to highlight the entire spreadsheet.

2. Right-click in the spreadsheet and choose Format Cells.

3. In the Cell Attributes window (Figure 22-1), select the Cell Protection tab and deselect the Protected option.

4. Click OK.

5. In the spreadsheet, select the cells you want to protect. See Selecting Non-Adjacent Cells on page 535.

6. Right-click one of the selected cells and choose Format Cells.

7. In the Cell Protection tab, select the Protected option.

8. Click OK.

9. Choose Tools > Protect Document > Sheet to protect the sheet. If you've set up cells for protection on multiple sheets, choose Tools > Protect Document > Document to protect all sheets.

10. In the Protect Sheet (or Protect Document) window that appears, you can set a password that applies to unprotecting the cells.

    If you don't want to require a password for unprotecting the cells, don't enter a password in this window. Just click OK.

If you forget your password for unprotecting sheets, you're out of luck. You have to live with the cell protection. You can't even delete a protected sheet. You can, however, copy a protected cell to and paste it into an unprotected cell, where it will become unprotected .

Protected cells can still change format with conditional formatting if the conditional formatting was applied before the cells were protected.