Lock Cells to avoid editing, Hide Formulas

Sometimes you create amazing projects, dashboards however people can make mistakes and edit the calculations, formats what you have made. Still you can protect the sheets, workbooks and prevent users to make any editing via “Protect Workbook” Option

However you need an additional feature along with the “Protect Sheet” to allow user to made editing, formatting to specific cells or hide formulas, disallow the user to select locked Ranges

So here let’s understand how we can do this:

1. Lock Specific Range/Unlock Specific Range for editing in Protected Worksheets

- Entire spreadsheet cells are always in Locked mode by default. So we should unlock the specific cells/range which we want to keep on editing mode

Select the Cells, Range which you want to allow for editing. So here I select “B2:B21” range which I will be unlocking

Right Click on the Selected Ranges and click on Format Cells. Below window should appear:

Below window will appear. Then Go to Protect Tab and uncheck the box “Locked” and click “Ok”. It will unlock the cells. Then you may Protect Sheets

This will unlock the selected Ranges for editing and user may get restricted to these ranges. It will help you to protect your excel formatting, formulas, headers etc. and everybody can use only specified ranges which you may colour code.

Note: While protecting worksheet, if you uncheck the box “Locked Cells” as below image. It will restrict the user to navigate only on “Unlocked Ranges”

So below gif Image may help you to understand entire process of “Unlocking Specific Range”

2. Hide Formulas In Protected Worksheet

I am sure that there are some projects where we did lots of research to create complex formulas, calculation and we do not want to show those amazing tricks which we created by ourselves but people can read your formulas in “Formula Bar” even if you have protected the sheet as you can see below image (though this is not a complex one ):