How to highlight locked cells in Excel

In default, the cells are locked in Excel, but if you have formatted some cells as unlocked before, you may forget where the locked cells and unlocked cells are in. In this case, I will tell you a trick to highlight the locked cells which helps you quickly find the locked or unlocked cells.

Highlight locked cells with Conditional Formatting

Highlight locked/unlocked cells with Kutools for Excel

Highlight locked cells

To highlight locked cells, please do as below steps:

1. Select a range you want to highlight the locked cells, then click Home > Conditional Formatting > New Rule. See screenshot:

2. In the New Formatting Rule dialog, select Use a formula to determine which cells to format in the Select a Rule Type list, and then type this formula =CELL("protect",A1) into Format values where this formula is true text box. See screenshot:

Note: In the above formula, A1 is the first cell of your selected range.

3. Then click Format to open Format Cells dialog, click Fill tab, and select a color to highlight the locked cells. See screenshot:

4. Click OK > OK. Then you can see the locked cells are highlighted by the color you defined. See screenshot:

Highlight locked/unlocked cells with Kutools for Excel

Here is a utility called Select Unlocked Cells in Kutools for Excel--a handy add in tool, which can help you select the unlock cells first, and then apply Kutools for Excel's Select Range Helper to specify the lock cells and the highlight them as you need.

After free installing Kutools for Excel, please do as below:

1. Select the range you want to find and highlight locked cells, here is A1:C9 and click Kutools > Select > Select Unlocked Cells. See screenshot:

2. Now all the unlocked cells in this range are selected, and keep the selection, and go to click Kutools > Select > Select Range Helper. See screenshot:

3. In the popping dialog, check Inverse Selection. See screenshot:

4. Then go to select the range A1:C9 which is the range you want to find the locked cells, you can see the selection change from unlocked cells to locked cells. See screenshot:

5. Now you just can go to Home > Fill Color to select a color to highlight the locked cells. See screenshot:

Tip: If you just want to highlight unlocked cells, you can skip step 2-4, directly shade cells after applying Select Unlocked Cells.

Click here to know more about Select Range Helper.

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