How to Protect Workbooks, Worksheets, and Cells From Editing in Microsoft Excel

You’ve worked hard on your spreadsheet. You don’t want anyone to mess it up. Fortunately, Excel provides some pretty good tools for preventing people from editing various parts of a workbook.

Protection in Excel is password-based and happens at three different levels.

• Workbook: You have a few options for protecting a workbook. You can encrypt it with a password to limit who can even open it. You can make the file open as read-only by default so that people have to opt into editing it. And you protect the structure of a workbook so that anyone can open it, but they need a password to rearrange, rename, delete, or create new worksheets.
• Worksheet: You can protect the data on individual worksheets from being changed.
• Cell: You can also protect just specific cells on a worksheet from being changed. Technically this method involves protecting a worksheet and then allowing certain cells to be exempt from that protection.

You can even combine the protection of those different levels for different effects.

Protect an Entire Workbook from Editing

You have three choices when it comes to protecting an entire Excel workbook: encrypt the workbook with a password, make the workbook read-only, or protect just the structure of a workbook.

Encrypt a Workbook with a Password

For the best protection, you can encrypt the file with a password. Whenever someone tries to open the document, Excel prompts them for a password first.

To set it up, open your Excel file and head to the File menu. You’ll see the “Info” category by default. Click the “Protect Workbook” button and then choose “Encrypt with Password” from the dropdown menu.

In the Encrypt Document window that opens, type your password and then click “OK.”

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