Excel 2003 Programming: A Developer's Notebook

Protect Items in a Workbook

In Excel, protection means preventing changes to parts of a workbook. You can apply protection to worksheets, charts, ranges, formatting, and window layout. Protection can use a password, or it may omit the password if the protection is intended to prevent accidental changes rather than malicious ones.

You can protect multiple items within a workbook and you can use different passwords for each of those items, though that’s generally a bad idea. The more passwords you use, the more likely you are to confuse them—especially within a single workbook. It’s a good idea to use the same password when protecting multiple items.

Note

Protection allows users to read, but not change, parts of a workbook. Protection is applied in different ways to different items within a workbook.

How to do it

To prevent changes to a worksheet:

1. Add data to your worksheet and adjust the formatting so it appears the way you want it to.

2. From the Tools menu, choose Protection then Protect a Sheet. Excel displays the Protect Sheet dialog box shown in Figure 6-8.

3. Type a password and select the actions you want to permit on the worksheet from the list. Click OK. Excel prompts you to confirm the password.

After a worksheet is protected, you can’t change it without unprotecting it first. To unprotect the worksheet, select Tools → Protection → Unprotect Sheet and enter the password.

Worksheet protection applies to all of the locked cells on a worksheet. To allow users to edit ...