how to enable excel spreadsheet for editing on mac

Enable Excel Spreadsheet For Editing On Password To Limit

Shes co-author of the book Museum Hacks Guide to Historys Fiercest Females.

Fortunately, Excel provides some pretty good tools for preventing people from editing various parts of a workbook.

Enable Excel Spreadsheet For Editing On Password To Limit

You can encrypt it with a password to limit who can even open it.

You can make the file open as read-only by default so that people have to opt into editing it.

And you protect the structure of a workbook so that anyone can open it, but they need a password to rearrange, rename, delete, or create new worksheets.

Technically this method involves protecting a worksheet and then allowing certain cells to be exempt from that protection.

Click the Protect Workbook button and then choose Encrypt with Password from the dropdown menu.

Excel does not provide any way to recover a forgotten password, so make sure you use one youll remember.

But, after you close it, the next time you open it, Excel will prompt you to enter the password.

Only this time, make the password field blank and then click OK.

It doesnt offer any real protection because anyone who opens the file can enable editing, but it can serve as a suggestion to be careful about editing the file.

This type of protection prevents people who dont have the password from making changes at the workbook level, which means they wont be able to add, remove, rename, or move worksheets.

To reinstate it, you must go back to the file menu and protect the workbook again.

When you protect a worksheet, Excel locks all of the cells from editing.

Protecting your worksheet means that no one can edit, reformat, or delete the content.

For example, you might want to allow people to format, but not delete, rows and columns.

Note that the protection is entirely removed and that youll need to protect the sheet again if you want.

Whatever the reason, you can easily lock only certain cells in Microsoft Excel.

It might seem counterintuitive, but hey, thats Office for you.

This method of selecting the cells you want to stay unlocked and then locking the sheet works better.

Over the past five years, shes written hundreds of articles on everything from Microsoft Office to education to history.

How To Enable Excel Spreadsheet For Editing On Mac