Protecting your data in MS Excel 2007 is a two step process.
All cells in an MS Excel Spreadsheet are locked by default.Step one locks or unlocks specific cells within your spreadsheet and step two applies the Protect Sheet option. Until you complete step two of the process, all of your data is vulnerable to change.
Follow the steps below to learn how to protect and unprotect your data:
- Enter some data in cells in a worksheet. Just put in any old numbers.
- Now drag to select the cells where you just entered random numbers.
- Click on the Home tab.
- In the Cells group, click on the drop-down arrow next to Format.
The drop-down list appears.
- You can now click on Lock Cell with the little padlock next to it.
The Lock Cell option works like a toggle for on an off. Since all cells are initially locked in he worksheet, clicking on Lock Cell a second time Unlocks the highlighted cells.
To finish this process, you now need to apply the Protect Sheet option covered above.
- Within the same sheet, clock on the Home tab, in the Cells group, use the drop-down arrow next to Format to display the drop-down list.
- Click on the Protect Sheet option at the bottom of the list to open the Protect Sheet dialog box.
This dialog box has a number of options to select from when applying protection to your worksheet.
The first option is to add a password to prevent worksheet protection from being turned off.
There follows a number of option that can be turned on or off using the check boxes next to them. The first two allow you to drag select locked and unlocked cells. If these two are turned off, you will not be able to make any changes to a worksheet even if it contains unlocked cells.
The remaining options allow you to carry out specifif tasks on a protected worksheet, such as formatting cells and sorting data. Be advised though, that that not all work the same, such as if the format cells option is checked off when a sheet is protected, all cells can be formatted. Alternatively, the sort option only works on those cells that have been unlocked before the sheet was protected.
To turn off Worksheet Protection follow the steps below:
- On the Home tab, in the Cells group, click the drop-down arrow next to Format to display the drop-down list.
- Click on the Unprotect Sheet option at the bottom of the list.