- [Instructor] If you'd like to protect an Excel file,
there's two options.
The first one is an entire work-based coverage.
If you lock down a workbook,
nobody can accidentally or deliberately
change, delete, move, or rearrange worksheets.
To do this, you can change to the review tab
and click protect workbook.
You can put in a password and click OK.
You have to reenter it, which is good.
Click OK again, and the workbook is protected.
If anybody comes in here and right clicks,
you'll notice that all the important ones are grayed out,
such as inserting, deleting, renaming, or moving.
They also can't hide or unhide a sheet.
I'll click protect workbook and turn it off.
You do need that password again to turn it off.
The second way to lock down a file
involves fine tuning cells or columns on a sheet.
It's called protecting the sheet.
It gives you more options, but it is a two-step process.
The first step is to unlock what the users can access.
The second step is to lock down what they can't change.
I'm going to unlock everything
and then only locked down the things that I want.
I'll select the top left-hand side
of the Excel file to select everything,
and then I can right-click on any cell
and choose format cells.
I'm going to go over to the protection tab.
And if you've ever been in here and seen this locked button,
you might be wondering what it means.
It actually means nothing, unless the sheet is protected.
So I'm going to unlock everything for now.
I'll click OK.
And now I'm going to decide
what I don't want people to change.
I don't want anybody to be able to edit the Email field,
so I'm going to lock all the cells in this column.
So I'll right-click, choose format cells.
In the protection tab. I'll click locked.
I'll click OK, again.
And now that column will be locked from editing.
Something else that I might want to do
is protect this Home Phone field.
I don't want anybody to be able to see that field
because it's the home phone numbers of my employees.
This could also be a salary field,
or a credit card field, or something else.
So I'm going to right-click and hide this entire column.
With those two actions done, now we'll protect the sheet.
I'll click protect sheet, and I'll put in the same password.
And underneath that, I have to decide what people can do
if they have that password.
You can scroll through this list
and see what people need to do.
I'll click OK.
I'll put the password in again.
And now my sheet is protected.
If somebody tries to change this,
they're going to get a popup that says that it's protected.
To make the change unprotect it,
and you'll need that password.
I'll click OK.
A user will also know that there's a hidden column.
For example, it's very easy to tell
that column E is missing and therefore hidden.
However, you can't unhide it without the password.
To unprotect it, you can come back to that review tab,
click unprotect sheet and put the password in.