Excel 2019 Bible

CHAPTER 34Protecting Your Work

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Protecting worksheets
• Protecting workbooks
• Protecting Visual Basic Projects
• Creating PDFs and checking documents

The concept of “protection” gets a lot of attention in the Excel forums. It seems that many users want to learn how to protect various workbook elements from being overwritten or copied. Excel has several protection-related features, and those features are covered in this chapter.

Types of Protection

Excel's protection-related features fall into three categories:

• Worksheet protection    Protecting all or part of a worksheet from being modified or restricting the modifications to certain users
• Workbook protection    Protecting a workbook from having sheets inserted or deleted and requiring the use of a password to open the workbook
• Visual Basic (VB) protection    Using a password to prevent others from viewing or modifying your VBA code

CAUTION

Before we discuss these features, you should understand the limitations of security. Using a password to protect some aspect of your work doesn't guarantee that it's secure. Password-cracking utilities (and some simple tricks) have been around for a long time. Using passwords works in the majority of cases, but if unscrupulous individuals are truly intent on getting to your data, they can usually find a way. If security is critical, perhaps Excel isn't the proper tool.

Protecting a Worksheet

You may want to protect a worksheet for a variety of reasons. One common ...