- [Instructor] If you'd like to protect an Excel file,
there's two options.
The first one is entire workbook 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
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and click OK.
You have to reenter it, which is good.
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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, and moving.
They also can't hide or unhide a sheet.
I'll click Protect Workbook again and turn it off.
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As long as I don't turn it back on again,
it's still unprotected.
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,
and the second step is to lock down what they can't change.
I'm going to unlock everything
and then only lock down the things that I want.
I'll select the top left hand side of the Excel worksheet
to select everything,
and then I can right click on any cell
and choose Format Cells...
Now 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 down all of the cells in this column.
So I'll right click and choose Format Cells...
In the Protection tab,
this time I'll place a check mark next to Locked.
I'll click OK,
and now this column will be locked from editing
once we protect the sheet.
Something else that I might want to do
is protect this Home Phone column.
I don't want anybody to be able to see
that this column exists,
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 select the column,
right click, and Hide the entire column.
With those two actions done, now we'll protect the sheet.
I'll click Protect Sheet this time,
I'll put in a password,
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and underneath that,
I have to decide what people can do
if they have that password.
You can scroll through this list and check
or uncheck what people need to do.
I'll click OK, put the password in again,
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click OK again, and now my sheet is protected.
If somebody tries to change this,
they're going to get a popup that says it's protected.
To make the change unprotect it,
and you'll need that password.
I'll click OK.
Now, a user will also know that there's a hidden column.
For example, it's very easy to tell here
that column E is missing and therefore hidden.
However, you can't unhide it without the password.
To unprotect it, click on the Review tab again,
click Unprotect Sheet, and put the password in.
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