To send it out to the different departments different people i've put a great header here to fill in the blue fields only but what do you think is going to happen will people stick to.
That will they just fill in the blue fields or are they going to go and maybe type in stuff in other places as well well some people are probably going to do that right and i want to avoid that i.
Want to make sure they can't type in anywhere else only in the blue fields that's when protection comes into play to get to protection just go to the review tab and you can protect your.
Sheet you can give it a password to protect it so guess what my password is here when you click ok you have to reconfirm your password and click on ok now everything is protected so if i want.
This but leave the blue fields open so let me go and unprotect this sheet to unprotect i'm going to put my password here now i'm protecting because i want to make changes to this right so as long.
As this sheet is protected you can't do anything you can't make any adjustments to it first you have to unprotect make your adjustments and then protect again there are different ways you can protect.
Separate ranges you could use this feature here which is allow edit ranges and define the ranges that you want people to edit or you can use the format cells option this is the version i'm.
Going to use because i find it to be quite flexible so just right mouse click go to format cells or use the shortcut key control 1 and the last tab here is called protection by default every cell.
Has a check mark for locked this really confused me at the beginning because i didn't know what it really meant and i didn't really understand what it said here but basically this means that once.
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You actually protect your sheet any cell
That has the check mark will be locked so you can't input it if you want that cell to be adjustable to be changeable you need to remove that check mark so.For example let's just select more than one cell i'm going to select this range here by holding down control i'm making the selection and now i'm going to use the shortcut key ctrl 1. you can also.
Write mouse click and go to format cells and take away that check mark and then click on ok now that i've made that adjustment nothing is going to happen unless i protect the sheet so now i'm.
Going to go and protect the sheet again this time i'm not going to give it a password let's just go with ok so what happens here is if i go to the white cell here type in a 5 i can't because.
It's protected if i go to here and i want to change this i can because the cell isn't locked anymore but this one right here that's still protected i didn't do it for this.
I just selected these so to do it for all the blue cells here i can go and manually select them but i'm not going to do that instead i'm going to let excel select.
Them using this method press ctrl f to get to the find and replace options you usually come here when you're looking for text but you can also look for formatting here so let's go ahead and.
Click on format i'm looking for this blue color so i'm in the fill options here and that blue color is this one right here click on ok and find all this is going to find all.
Of the cells that have that color and to actually see that selection here i'm going to press ctrl a to select everything now with everything selected i actually.
Want to go ahead and unselect this i'm
Just holding down control and clicking on these cells to unselect them we don't need this find and replace anymore it's done its work what i need.To do is format these cells and remove that check mark for locked remember the shortcut key for that is control 1. let's jump to protection and for locked and we get that little dot in there it.
Means that it's a mix some cells have a check mark and some don't have a check mark i want to make sure that all of them don't have a check mark so just click click remove that check mark click.
On ok and now all of these cells are open after you protect the sheet so i'm going to protect let's not give it a password now check this out i can type in.
Anywhere here these are all unprotected but if i want to go and change this formula and delete it i can't.
Everything else is protected now in case you have a situation where you want to unprotect everything except for a few single cells you can do it the other way around so you could select everything.
Here press ctrl 1 remove that check mark so everything is unprotected and then select those single cells that you want protected and put back the check mark for them.
So that's how you can lock cells in excel if you've used this before let me know what you think of it because at the beginning i found this whole locking experience quite confusing so comment.
Below let me know what you think thank you for being here thank you for watching subscribe if you haven't subscribed yet and i'm gonna see you in the next video.