What if you only want to protect a single, or several single cells, in an entire Excel worksheet and allow users to edit or input data in the rest of the sheet?
Let’s say you have a worksheet like this:
You would like your department members to edit the “data” in the black text cells, but you want to protect the “data” in the red text boxes from accidental changes.
First, you need to unprotect the entire worksheet. That sounds counterintuitive.
But Excel protects all cells in the worksheet by default whenever you set protections, so we need to turn that off in order to only protect individual cells.
To do this:
Save your worksheet and close it.
Now anyone who opens the worksheet will only be able to select and edit those cells that are not locked.