Protect Formula Cells

The use of worksheet protection in Excel is a little strange. Using the steps below, you can quickly protect just the formula cells in your worksheet.

It seems unusual, but all 16 billion cells on a worksheet start out with their Locked property set to True. You need to unlock all of the cells first:

Select all cells by using the icon above and to the left of cell A1.
Press Ctrl+1 (that is the number 1) to open the Format Cells dialog.
In the Format Cells dialog, go to the Protection tab. Uncheck Locked. Click OK.

Select all cells and change the Locked property to off.

While all cells are still selected, select Home, Find & Select, Formulas.

At this point, only the formula cells are selected. Press Ctrl+1 again to display the Format Cells dialog. On the Protection tab, choose Locked to lock all of the formula cells.

With only the formula cells selected, set Locked property to On.

Locking cells does nothing until you protect the worksheet. On the Review tab, choose Protect Sheet. In the Protect Sheet dialog, choose if you want people to be able to select your formula cells or not.

Note

Scroll down a few rows in the Protect Sheet dialog box to reveal popular choices: Use AutoFilter and Use PivotTable & PivotChart. If you want allow people to interact with these features, scroll down and select them.

Caution

Don’t bother putting in a password.

Comments

Rank Function

How to Use the RANK Function If you give the RANK function a number, and a list of numbers, it will tell you the rank of that number in the list, either in ascending or descending order. For example, in the screen shot below, there is a list of 10 student test scores, in cells B2:B11. To find the rank of the the first student's score in cell B2, enter this formula in cell C2: =RANK(B2,$B$2:$B$11) Then, copy the formula from cell C2 down to cell C11, and the scores will be ranked in descending order. RANK Function Arguments There are 3 arguments for the RANK function: number : in the above example, the number to rank is in cell B2 ref : We want to compare the number to the list of numbers in cells $B$2:$B$11 . Use an absolute reference ($B$2:$B11), instead of a relative reference (B2:B11)so the referenced range will stay the same when you copy the formula down to the cells below order : (optional) This argument tells Excel whether to rank the list in ascending or descending o...

Compare two columns with Go To Special

In the figure below, say that you want to find any changes between column A and column D. Select the data in A2:A9 and then hold down the Ctrl key while you select the data in D2:D9. Select, Home, Find & Select, Go To Special. Then, in the Go To Special dialog, choose Row Differences. Click OK. Only the items in column A that do not match the items in column D are selected. Use a red font to mark these items, as shown below. Caution This technique works only for lists that are mostly identical. If you insert one new row near the top of the second list, causing all future rows to be offset by one row, each of those rows is marked as a row difference

Vlookup to the Left with Index and Match function

What if your lookup value is to the right of the information that you want VLOOKUP to return? Conventional wisdom says VLOOKUP cannot handle a negative column number in order to go left of the key. One solution is =VLOOKUP(I7,CHOOSE({1,2},G1:G5,F1:F5),2,0) . However, I prefer to use MATCH to find where the name is located and then use INDEX to return the correct value.

Solutions for Data Science

Search This Blog