Page 460 - Excel 2013 All-in-One For Dummies

442 Protecting the Spreadsheet
Remember that changing the protection formatting of cell ranges in the worksheet (as described above) does nothing in and of itself. It’s not until you turn on the protection for your worksheet (as outlined in the next sec- tion) that your unlocked and hidden cells work or appear any differently from the locked and unhidden cells. At that time, only unlocked cells accept edits, and only unhidden cells display their contents on the Formula bar when they contain the cell cursor.
Protecting the worksheet
When you’ve gotten all cell ranges that you want unlocked and hidden cor- rectly formatted in the worksheet, you’re ready to turn on protection. To do this, you click the Protect Sheet command button on the Ribbon’s Review tab or press Alt+RPS to open the Protect Sheet dialog box, shown in Figure 1-3.
When you first open this dialog box, only the Protect Worksheet and Contents of Locked Cells check box at the very top and the Select Locked Cells and Select Unlocked Cells check boxes in the Allow All Users of This Worksheet To list box are selected. All the other check box options (includ- ing some that are not visible without scrolling up the Allow All Users of This Worksheet To list box) are deselected.
Figure 1-3:
Selecting the protection options in the Protect Sheet dialog box.
This means that if you click OK at this point, the only things that you’ll be permitted to do in the worksheet are edit unlocked cells and select cell ranges (of any type: both locked and unlocked alike).
If you really want to keep other users out of all the locked cells in a work- sheet, clear the Select Locked Cells check box in the Allow All Users of This Worksheet To list box to remove its check mark. That way, your users are completely restricted to just those unlocked ranges where you permit data input and content editing.