Excel 2016 Bible

Chapter 30Protecting Your Work

IN THIS CHAPTER

1. Protecting worksheets
2. Protecting workbooks
3. Protecting Visual Basic Projects
4. Creating PDFs and checking documents

The concept of “protection” gets a lot of attention in the Excel forums. It seems that many users want to learn how to protect various workbook elements from being overwritten or copied. Excel has several protection-related features, and those features are covered in this chapter.

Types of Protection

Excel's protection-related features fall into three categories:

• Worksheet protection: Protecting all or part of a worksheet from being modified or restricting the modifications to certain users
• Workbook protection: Protecting a workbook from having sheets inserted or deleted and requiring the use of a password to open the workbook
• Visual Basic (VB) protection: Using a password to prevent others from viewing or modifying your VBA code

Caution

Before I discuss these features, you should understand the notion of security. Using a password to protect some aspect of your work doesn't guarantee that it's secure. Password-cracking utilities (and some simple tricks) have been around for a long time. Using passwords works in the majority of cases, but if someone is truly intent on getting to your data, he can usually find a way. If absolute security is critical, perhaps Excel isn't the proper tool.

Protecting a Worksheet

You may want to protect a worksheet for a variety of reasons. One common reason is to prevent yourself ...