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How to Lock Cells 🔒in Excel to Protect your Formulas & Only Allow Input where Needed

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Today, let's take a look at how you can  lock cells in Excel. This is practical for  

when you want to create a template that  you need to send to others to fill out,  

and you want to make sure that  they only input in the right places  

and that they don't delete your  formulas. Let me show you how that works.

So I've started to work on this great investment  calculation tool, and I want to send it out to the  

different departments and different people. I've  put a great header here to fill in the blue fields  

only, but what do you think is going to happen?  Will people stick to that, or will they just  

fill in the blue fields, or are they going to go  and maybe type in stuff in other places as well?  

Well, some people are probably going to  do that, right? And I want to avoid that.  

I want to make sure they can't type in  anywhere else, only in the blue fields.  

That's when protection comes into play. To get to  protection, just go to the Review tab, and you can  

protect your sheet. You can give it a password to  protect it. So, guess what? My password is here.  

When you click OK, you have to reconfirm  your password and click on OK. Now,  

everything is protected. So, if I want to  go in and type over this one and put a 5,  

I can't. I get this error, but everything is  protected. So even my blue fields are protected.  

I can't input anything in here. So I need to  protect this but leave the blue fields open. So,  

let me go and unprotect this sheet. To unprotect,  I'm going to put my password here. Now I'm  

protecting because I want to make changes to this,  right? So, as long as this sheet is protected,  

you can't do anything. You can't make any  adjustments to it. First, you have to unprotect,  

make your adjustments, and then protect again.  There are different ways you can protect separate  

ranges. You could use this feature here, which is  "Allow Edit Ranges," and define the ranges that  


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