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
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 300 handy functions, makes your jobs more easier.
After free installing Kutools for Excel, please do as below:
1. Click Kutools Plus > 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.
Kutools for Excel Solves Most of Your Problems, and Increases Your Productivity by 80%
Reuse: Quickly insert complex formulas, charts and anything that you have used before; Encrypt Cells with password; Create Mailing List and send emails...
Super Formula Bar (easily edit multiple lines of text and formula); Reading Layout (easily read and edit large numbers of cells); Paste to Filtered Range...
Select Duplicate or Unique Rows; Select Blank Rows (all cells are empty); Super Find and Fuzzy Find in Many Workbooks; Random Select...
Exact Copy Multiple Cells without changing formula reference; Auto Create References to Multiple Sheets; Insert Bullets, Check Boxes and more...
Extract Text, Add Text, Remove by Position, Remove Space; Create and Print Paging Subtotals; Convert Between Cells Content and Comments...
Super Filter (save and apply filter schemes to other sheets); Advanced Sort by month/week/day, frequency and more; Special Filter by bold, italic...
Combine Workbooks and WorkSheets; Merge Tables based on key columns; Split Data into Multiple Sheets; Batch Convert xls, xlsx and PDF...
More than 300 powerful features. Supports Office/Excel
2007-2019 and 365. Supports all languages. Easy deploying in your enterprise or organization. Full features
30-day free trial. 60-day money back guarantee.
Useful guide, however, I don't think if this is responding to my need. to explain a bit of my need I wanted to lock cells with formulas and formats but I want the formulas to generate what they are supposed to do. i.e. I have VLOOKUP formula which I want to vlookup value from another sheet based on the ID so when I add the unique ID the VLOOKUP formula doesn't return since the cell is locked.. in short, I want my formulas to work but don't allow other people to modify and delete the formulas!
Hi I would like to protect cells that has formulas but when I lock the sheet with a password, I cannot group and un-group cells that are grouped. How do I protect the sheet and still have the functionality to group and un-group. I have inserted the following VB code:
Sub EnableOutlining() 'Update 20140603 Dim xWs As Worksheet Set xWs = Application.ActiveSheet Dim xPws As String xPws = Application.InputBox("Password:", xTitleId, "", Type:=2) xWs.Protect Password:=xPws, Userinterfaceonly:=True xWs.EnableOutlining = True End Sub
It works but when I open and close the file I need to run the code each time. Is there a code where this is not required? Thanks
This is the only page that showed step 5. And all my formulas are protected. But how do I protect formulas AND all the text I put in. The Workbook I created is an invoice ledger. So I have cells with text, that is not protected. All I want them to do is fill in the ledger with the purchase dollars. Not to be able to change category names, or pager titles.
Have gone through this half a dozen times, yes! it is locking cells containing formula, but all formatting is greyed out.
I have an Allocation Sheet, which has DAYS and NIGHTS on if we do DAYS Nights formula is strikethrough, and vice versa, but change DAYS to NIGHTS, but not from strikethrough! Cannot change FONT colour either.
What I need is a way to use 2 different passwords on a shared worksheet. I need to be able to lock my formulas and then when someone puts in the data they need to lock and protect with another password. Is this possible?
si want to freez the formula in one sheet of the book , like daly am receiving the files day wise as summry-15 & summry-16, i need certain summry so i made summry in one sheet (in the same book) using vlookup & hlookup ,but when am pasting the formula in summry-16 formula is taking the data from suury15 only i need formula has to take from the current book only(which my summry sheet part of the book).
In step 5, user should be selecting Locked AND Hidden in order for the formula not to show and be able to be edited by others without changing formula.
I want to have users be able to edit column 1 and column 2 but not be able to edit anything in column 3 (the formula) yet have it add up. I would like to lock only the column with the formula. When I do this it does not allow me to edit the other cells (which the formula adds up).Please help!
Dear author, thank you very much for such a useful guide. Please, advise if it is possible to lock the formula cells in excel so that it is possible to delete other bulk data from the file without deleting the formulas? With the method above, it is not possible to select whole data with ctrl+A and delete.
Hi, please help me out, i have 3 columns (Ticket Number, Site ID, Time) i need to copy Site ID and Time according to the Ticket Number from 1st Excel sheet to 2nd excel sheet
For Example : I Have Ticket Number 425665 with Three Site ID's UW_GJ_2904 , UW_GJ_1995 , UW_GJ_0960 , So i need to copy all three site id's from 1st Excel sheet to 2nd excel sheet .... But as per vlookup only first site ID is Reflecting UW_GJ_2904 is Reflecting in all three places, which it should not(in some cases for single ticket Ex: 425771 : only one site UW_GJ_0514 will be there, it was reflecting properly, The problem is for each ticket which has more than one site ID is not reflecting properly)
First Excel Sheet : Ticket Site id time 425665 UW_GJ_2904 1/21/14 4:51 PM 425665 UW_GJ_1995 1/21/14 4:51 PM 425665 UW_GJ_0960 1/21/14 4:51 PM
Second Excel Sheet: ticket site id time 425665 UW_GJ_2904 1/21/14 4:51 PM 425665 UW_GJ_2904 1/21/14 4:51 PM 425665 UW_GJ_2904 1/21/14 4:51 PM
if it is only one id its Reflecting properly First excel sheet:
[quote name="RIJESH"]:roll: NICE EXPLANATION GOOD ONE....[/quote] Well it looks good, but I have followed it at least 6 times and each time it does not lock any of my formulaes.
:-) Great that really helps. My errant pen mouse would sometimes scrape the cell box and the formula would pop up, and not knowing, sometimes I had changed it. Caused many headaches while doing banking in the totals column. thanks again.
