How to protect Cells in Google Sheets 🔐| 2 min guide

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In this article, we will see how to protect cells in Google Sheets. We will also have a look at how to protect individual sheets in your spreadsheets.

Why protect cells in Google Sheets?

You can choose who can edit some specific cells or sheets in your Google Sheets. It is very useful when you have a lot of people working on the same Google Sheet file. You can choose people who can edit the values. It also alerts the users if they don’t have the access to edit the cell. Hence a user should know how to protect cells in Google Sheets.

Protect Cells In Google Sheets

If you want to keep values for some cell’s content and don’t want anyone to change their values, you can use this feature.

If you want to fix the commission rate to 8 per cent and you don’t want anyone to change it, you can follow the given steps.

• Select the cells you want to lock. Right-click and click on Protect Cells

• A sidebar would open. Click on “Add sheet or Range”.

• Add a description for the cell you’re locking.

• Set the range for the cell and click on “Set permissions”.

• Set the permissions for the cell. Here we would give permissions to only ourselves so that no one else could change the values for the given cell.

• If an unauthorised person tries to update the value of the cell, he/she would be shown the following error.

• If you want to permit more people you can choose “Custom” while choosing the permission and roles and you’ll be presented with the following screen.

• Enter the people you want to give permission to and click “Done”.

Locking Entire sheets instead of a few cells

You can also lock entires sheets instead of a few cells in Google Sheets. Simply while declaring the essentials, choose “Sheet” instead of “Range”.

• You can also choose to exclude a few cells while locking a sheet by clicking on the “Except certain cells” in the checkbox.

• To exclude cells, simply add the ranges.
• The rest of the steps are the same as the previous sections and shouldn’t be any different.

Unlock the protected cell

Unlocking a protected cell is pretty easy. Simply follow the given steps.

• Select the cells you want to lock. Right-click and click on Protect Cells

• Select the rule you want to delete

• Click on the trash icon next to the rule name. Confirm the popup that comes up and it should unlock your cell.

Conclusion

We saw how to protect cells in Google Sheets. It is very useful when you have a lot of people working on the same sheet and you only want some people to have edit access for important fields. You can read more about protecting, hiding and editing sheets here.

See Also

How to import JSON in Google Sheets: See how to work with JSON using Apps Script Editor

Using Vlookup and Hlookup together: Learn how to perform 2-D lookups by combining Vlookup and Hlookup