🔒 PROTECT specific cells in an Excel Worksheet 👍🏻

There is nothing more infuriating than creating a fancy spreadsheet with loads of whizzy formulas and then sending it to Pam only for her to go in and completely break and mess up the formulas because as we've already established, Pam is not great at Excel at all. So how can we stop Pam from breaking all of our hard work? Well, one method we can use is to use protection on our cells. That's right kids, today we're going to be talking about protection. Now, one thing that's really important to know when you're thinking about protecting individual cells or ranges of cells in a worksheet and that is, and this will blow your mind because it blew mine, by default every single cell in Excel is locked. Strange, huh? Because if every cell is locked then how can we jump into a cell and start typing? Surely we wouldn't be able to do that if every single cell was locked. Well, it is true that every single cell is locked but that locking doesn't come into effect until we protect the worksheet. So on the review tab, we have a protect sheet option just here. As soon as we protect the sheet then every single cell will be locked. Now, if you still don't believe me, if you right click on any cell in your worksheet and go down to format cells, notice that we have a protection tab just here and you'll find that the locked checkbox is selected for every single cell in the worksheet. So they are in fact locked by default. So now that we've established that, let's take a look at this worksheet just here. Now, I just have some employees. Again, you might recognize some of these people. We have their current salary and then we have their new salary and this contains a formula. What we're basically doing here is we're multiplying their current salary by the value 5% in cell G3 because that's their bonus and then we're adding bonus amount onto their salary to give us their new salary. So I don't want Pam going in and breaking this formula. However, I do want Pam to be able to edit things like the current salary and also the bonus amount. So I effectively only want to lock the cells which contain formulas so she can't mess up those formulas. So I want to lock this range of cells but keep everything else editable. So remember by default every cell is locked. If I was to click protect sheet right now then every single cell in the worksheet wouldn't be editable. But I don't exactly want that. I want her to be able to edit the employees, the current salary and the bonus amount. So I need to unlock those cells first. So I'm going to select the ranges and the cells that I want to unlock. So that is the employee name, the current salary and also the bonus amount. And I just held down control when I selected the bonus amount because it's not next to my current selection. Now I need to right click and go into format cells and I'm going to unlock these cells. Now that I've done that, if I click on protect sheet, I could add a password if I wanted to. I'm not going to bother, I'm just going to click on OK. And now that I've done that, it means that these cells just here aren't editable. If I click in the new salary and try to change that formula, I'm going to get this message. However, I can edit the other cells. If I change the bonus amount to 10%, the formulas and everything else are going to update. And of course, if you want to reverse that and unprotect the sheet, we can just click unprotect sheet just here and we are back to normal. So that's how you can protect specific cells within a workbook to stop people meddling with your formulas. If you enjoyed this video, then give me a like, maybe consider following me and I will see you in the next one.