How to protect / lock hidden columns in Excel?
In Excel, Hide and Unhide columns are common functions that you may use them a lot, you can easily hide the columns and then unhide them again. But sometimes, you need to hide some columns which contain important data that you don't want others to read. How could you protect the hidden columns not being unhide by others in Excel?
- Protect or lock hidden columns with Excel feature
- Protect/lock hidden columns with Kutools for Excel
- Toggle button to show or hide hidden columns with only one click
Protect or lock hidden columns with Excel feature
In Excel, the following steps can help you prevent the hidden columns from seeing, please do as this:
1. Click the Select All button (the button at the intersection of row numbers and column letters). See screenshot:
2. Then right click, and choose Format Cells from the context menu, and in the popping out Format Cells dialog box, click Protection tab, and uncheck the Locked option. Then click OK button to close this dialog. See screenshot:
3. And then select the columns that you want to protect, and right click again, select Format Cells from the context menu.
4. In the Format Cells dialog box, click Protection tab, and then check the Locked option. And then click OK to close the dialog, see screenshot:
5. In this step, you can hide the selected columns, and then go to clicking Review > Protect Sheet.
6. And in the Protect Sheet dialog, enter your password and confirm it. See screenshots:
And when you unhide the columns with the Unhide function, the Unhide tool will become gray, so that you can't unhide the hidden columns. See screenshot:
Note: Because you have removed the locked status from all cells, you can enter data into the cells of worksheet as normal.
Easily protect/lock some cells/columns from editing in Excel
Kutools for Excel provides a quite easy way to protect or lock specified cells from editing in Excel: unlock the whole worksheet by Selection Unlock button, next lock the specified cells you will lock from editing by Selection Lock button, at last protect current worksheet. Click for detailed steps.
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Protect/lock hidden columns with Kutools for Excel
If you have Kutools for Excel installed, its Selection Lock utility and Selection Unlock utility will help you much easier to protect/lock hidden columns in Excel. You can do as follows:
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1. Click the Select All button (the button at the intersection of row numbers and column letters). See screenshot:
2. Click the Kutools Plus > Worksheet Design to activate the Design tab, and then click the Unlock Cells to unlock all cells in current sheet.
3. Select the columns that you will hide and protect, and then click the Design > Lock Cells.
Notes:
(1) Holding the Ctrl key, you can select multiple nonadjacent columns by selecting each column one by one;
(2) Holding the Shift key, you can select multiple adjacent columns by selecting the first columns and the last one.
4. Hide these columns, and then protect current sheet by clicking Design (or Review) > Protect Sheet, and type your password into both dialog box as following screen shot shown:
Then you will see hidden columns are locked and protected, while other cells in current sheet works as normal.
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Demo: protect / lock hidden columns in Excel
One click to unhide all hidden columns, and one click to restore hidden columns
Kutools for Excel’s (Show) Columns utility is a good toggle to show all hidden columns with only one click, and click this Column button for the second time will make these columns hidden again.
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