How to lock and protect formulas in Excel?
When you create a worksheet, sometimes you need to use some formulas, and you don’t want other users to change, edit or delete the formulas. The easiest and most common way of preventing people from playing with your formulas is to lock and protect cells which contain formulas in your worksheet. Please go to lock and protect the formulas as follows:
Lock and protect formulas with Format Cells and Protect Sheet functions
Lock and protect formulas with Worksheet Design 
Lock and protect formulas with Format Cells and Protect Sheet functions
By default, all cells on a worksheet are locked, so you must unlock all of the cells first.
1. Select the whole worksheet with Ctrl + A, and right click, choose Format Cells from the context menu.
2. And a Format Cells dialog box will pop out. Click Protection, and unchecked the Locked option. Click OK. The whole worksheet has been unlocked.
3. Then click Home > Find & Select > Go To Special, and a Go To Special dialog box will appear. Check Formulas from Select option, and then click OK. See screenshot:
4. All of the cells which contain formulas will be selected.
5. Then go to lock the select cells. Right click on the selected cells, and choose Format Cells from the context menu, and a Format Cells dialog box will display. Click Protection, check the Locked checkbox. See screenshot:
6. And then click Review > Protect Sheet, and a Protect Sheet dialog box will pop out, you can enter the password in the Passwordto unprotect sheet box. See screenshot:
7. Then click OK. And another Confirm Password dialog box will appear. Reenter your password. And click OK.
And then all cells which contain formulas have been locked and protected. In this case, you cannot modify the formulas, but you can edit other cells.
Lock and protect formulas with Worksheet Design
If you have installed Kutools for Excel, you can lock and protect formulas quickly by using Worksheet Design utility. | Kutools for Excel, with more than 120 handy functions, makes your jobs easier. | ||
After installing Kutools for Excel, please do as below:(Free Download Kutools for Excel Now!)
1. Click Enterprise > Worksheet Design to enable the Design group. See screenshot:
2. Then click Highlight Formulas to highlight all formula cells. See screenshot:
3.Select all the highlighted cells and click Selection Lock to lock the formulas. And there is a dialog pops out to remind you that the fomulas cannot lock until protect the sheet. See screenshots:
4. Now click Protect Sheet to type the password to protect the sheet. See screenshots:
Note
1. Now the formulas are locked and protected, and you can click Close Design to disable the Design tab.
2. If you want to unprotect the sheet, you just need to click Worksheet Design > Unprotect Sheet.
In Worksheet Design group, you can highlight unlock cell, name range and so on.
Recommended Productivity Tools
Office Tab
Bring handy tabs to Excel and other Office software, just like Chrome, Firefox and new Internet Explorer.
Kutools for Excel
Amazing! Increase your productivity in 5 minutes. Don't need any special skills, save two hours every day!
200 New Features for Excel, Make Excel Much Easy and Powerful:
- Merge Cell/Rows/Columns without Losing Data.
- Combine and Consolidate Multiple Sheets and Workbooks.
- Compare Ranges, Copy Multiple Ranges, Convert Text to Date, Unit and Currency Conversion.
- Count by Colors, Paging Subtotals, Advanced Sort and Super Filter,
- More Select/Insert/Delete/Text/Format/Link/Comment/Workbooks/Worksheets Tools...
