How to Lock Cells in Excel

Have you encountered a scenario where you do not want to lock the whole sheet, but just a couple of cells in your Excel worksheet?

Locking an entire sheet is straightforward, but locking separate cells is a different story.

Let us say, we have this single cell that we want to lock in our Excel worksheet:

Here is the game plan:

• All of the cells are locked by default, however locked cells have no effect until you have protected the worksheet
• So we will unlock all of the cells
• Then select the single target cell and lock it
• After that, we will protect the worksheet and our target cell will now be locked!

 

I explain how How to Lock Cells in Excel below:

STEP 1: Select all of the cells by clicking the upper left corner:

 

STEP 2: Right click any cell and select Format Cells:

 

STEP 3: Ensure Locked is unticked.  This will unlock our entire sheet.  Click OK.

 

STEP 4: Right click on our target cell and select Format Cells:

 

STEP 5: Ensure Locked is ticked this time. This will lock our target cell. Click OK.

 

STEP 6: Now it is time to protect our Excel sheet and see the locking in action!

Right-click on the Worksheet Name and select Protect Sheet (or go to the ribbon menu and select Review > Protect Sheet)

 

STEP 7: Type in a password and Click OK.  In our example, I typed in excel as the password.

 

STEP 8: Retype the password and Click OK.  

 

STEP 9: If you try editing your target cell now, Excel will not allow you to…And you are able to edit the other cells just fine!

 

How to Lock Cells in Excel