How to Lock and Unlock cells in Excel

http://www.TeachExcel.com
How to prevent data from being deleted from your spreadsheets. How to lock and unlock cells in excel. Also allows for bulletproof forms to be created which can't be accidentally altered.

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here i'm going to show you another way
that you can protect your worksheet
where you don't have to worry about
entering passwords
now what I mean is for instance say that
we want the benefits column to always be
editable but we don't want anything else
in a worksheet to be able to be edited
and we don't want to have to enter
password to edit the benefits part now a
very simple way to do this is to show
you by example first right click one
cell and click format cells now if you
go to the protection tab you'll notice
this locked and there is a box next to
it that's always checked now by default
it's checked
so all of them are checked if you
uncheck this once i click ok then go to
tools protection protect sheet and here
have select unlock cells checked but do
not allow locked cells to be selected so
uncheck that
select ok will notice is that you cannot
select any cells in the worksheet
except for those that are unlocked and
here you only have one so
you can delete it reenter it now what
I'm going to do here is unprotect the
sheet and i'm going to select this
entire range then right click format
cells and uncheck the lockbox
now this entire column is unproductive
or is unlocked not locked
someone had tools protection protect
sheet and now make it okay
it's going to allow me to edit any one
of these cells
so
one good thing to know is that even
though you can even click on any of
these cells they're still going to be
updated when you enter data into this
cell and that's because all the cells
under total compensation or formulas so
also if you wanted to make it so that
you can select these cells but you can't
edit them go up to tools protection
unprotect sheet then re protect the
sheet so let's go tools protection
protect sheet and in this box check the
box next to select locked cells
click OK now that's going to allow you
to do is to select any cell
however you cannot put any data in these
cells but here you can delete them and
add whatever you want
now the reason is because these cells
are unlocked so that's how if they are
making a form or anything like that that
you need to send out to a large amount
of people and you want them to fill in
their own information
what you can do is have a form a doubt
and have all of the cells locked except
for the cells where you want people to
enter their own data so you unlock those
specific cells then protect the
worksheet and they're going to be able
to enter say like their own benefits
whatever that is and send it back to you
but they're not going to be able to
change anything else in any of the other
columns or rows so that's the benefit of
doing this
in addition you can add a password to it
if you want
just unprotect the sheet and then we
protect it by adding a password up here
and also note that in this box under
here
if you select any of these safe format
cells format columns insert row center
column but that allow you to do is it
will allow anyone without this password
to format a cell or a column or to
insert a row
or a column is a large list here and if
you check any of them
it allows you to do that while the work
she's protected
I go into more depth on that subject in
another tutorial but the point of this
was just to show you that if you unlock
a cell
you can edit it while all the other
cells are uneditable in a protected
worksheet