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How To Protect Your Data In Excel From Manipulation

In this article I will explain how to protect your data in excel from being edited or deleted. Before you start reading this article further it is important to note that the method helps you to save your data from manipulation, but this doesn’t save the file from being deleted.

Let us start with the traditional software requirement and prerequisite knowledge section that we add in every tutorial.

Software Requirement

Before you start reading this tutorial you should make sure that excel 2007 (or above) is installed on your machine.

Prerequisite Knowledge

Before you go ahead, it is required that you should know basics about excel.

Open A New Excel

First of all open a new excel and save it with the name ‘Protect_your_data_demo.xlsx’ (you can give any name).

How To Protect Your Data

There are 2 ways in which you can protect your data

Method 1 –

Select Sheet1 (or any sheet you want to protect).
Right click on it and select the option ‘Protect Sheet…’

Picture showing the Protect Sheet... option in the context menu of the sheet tab

Click to Enlarge

Once you click on the option a window appears where you can set the password

Click to Enlarge

Enter password and click on ‘OK’.
Another window appears to confirm the entered password.

Picture showing the confirm password window

Click to Enlarge

Click ‘OK’.

Method 2 –

User can also select ‘Protect Sheet..’ option by clicking on the ‘Format’ button as shown in figure below.

Picture showing the protect sheet option from the format section of the excel sheet

Click to Enlarge

Rest of the steps will remain same. Once the sheet is protected and user wants to edit the content then he will get following message.

Picture showing the message when user tries to change the excel sheet

Click to Enlarge

Unprotect Your Sheet

To unprotect the sheet

Select the sheet.
Right click on it and select the option ‘Unprotect Sheet…’

Picture showing the unprotect sheet option for removing the password

Click to Enlarge

Once you click on the option a window appears to enter the password

Picture showing the password window when user tries to unprotect the protected sheet

Click to Enlarge

Once you click the valid password and click on ‘OK’ you can edit the content of excel file.

Posted By -	Karan Gupta

Posted On -	Sunday, June 8, 2014

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