hi everyone my name is kevin today i
want to show you how you could password
protect an excel spreadsheet why would
you want to do that well maybe you have
a spreadsheet that has sensitive
information maybe you have financial
data
and you don't want other people to
access it put a password on it and
that'll prevent other people from
entering unless they know the password
uh and as full disclosure before we jump
into this i work at microsoft as a
full-time employee all right enough talk
let's jump into it here i am on my pc
and i have the latest version of excel
that comes with office uh 365. if you
have a recent version like 2019 2016
2013 or any version before the password
production uh protection capability has
been there for a while so you should be
able to do this but i can't guarantee
anything because i'm just on the latest
version all right well let's open up
excel and oh i have important financial
data in this sheet this is an income
statement of revenue my youtube revenue
actually that's just made up i'm
dreaming there and there i could see how
much i make every single year i really
don't make that much but hey you can
dream right and here you can see all my
different expenses for whatever reason
those expenses always seem to creep up
and so here you can see my total
expenses and then i have my income loss
before taxes this is probably not stuff
that i just want to have easily
available that anyone can see so i
should probably password protect it so
how do we do that
what i'm going to do is we click on the
file menu and then by default i land in
this section called info
the good news is we want to be in info
because you'll see this option right
next to the info button that says
protect workbook
let's click on protect workbook and one
of the options is encrypt with password
that's exactly what we want to do so
let's click on that and i get this
little dialog that lets me type in a
password and now a few things to
remember they have this caution text
here and it's good that they include it
because basically if you forget your
password you're never going to get back
into this document
because there's no forget password hint
or anything like that in fact what they
recommend doing is write down the
password write down the file name and
store that in a safe place don't just
store that on your desk where anyone can
see it that actually happens a lot so
what we're going to do is we're going to
type in a super complicated password i'm
going to type in password and i'm just
kidding do not use that as a password um
it actually turns out when you look at
the most popular passwords they've done
analysis on this password is actually
one of the most popular passwords and if
you are using that as your password you
should change it right away because
that's a very poor password that's
probably the first password that most
people guess when they try to break into
an account um so i had to have me
re-enter the password because if i typed
it wrong i would never be able to get
into this sheet again so i'm going to
click on ok
and now it says a password is required
to open this notebook so what i'm going
to do is we're going to close excel and
i'm going to we'll go ahead and save the
sheet and then i'm going to open excel
again and we'll test it out
so here you'll see on my recent list my
password protect excel sheet is the
first item and here before i can open
the excel spreadsheet it says that it's
protected and i have to type in a
password so we're going to type in my
super complicated password that no one
can possibly guess and we're going to
click on ok
and so the password checks out and so
here it opens my data and i can see all
my important financial data so pretty
easy to set a password on your sheet
and so why would you do this well let's
say that you like storing your documents
in the cloud i personally have all my
documents in one drive because i don't
trust my computer maybe my hard drive
dies but when i'm putting sensitive
let's say financial information or other
sensitive information in the cloud
there's always that nagging worry that
maybe my account will get hacked and so
how do i protect against that well this
is one additional layer of security
where i can protect individual files
that contain sensitive information using
the password protection so kind of a
nice thing to apply to your sheet it'll
help you sleep a little easier at night
if you use something like this um so
anyway if you were able to protect more
of your data using this technique please
give this video a thumbs up if you want
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want to learn about any other things
that you're trying to figure out leave a
comment down below and i'll add it to my
list of videos to create in the future
and hey that's all i have for you today
i'll see you next time bye