When you share your worksheets outside of your organization, there is a bigger risk of content being changed or deleted or moved which even might be the most important data.
Hopefully, Excel provides the solution for such kinds of problems by giving an option to lock your sheet or password-protect an entire workbook to prevent accidental or intended changes in the content. Have a look at how to unprotect excel sheet
Things you need to know about Excel worksheet protection:
Worksheet protection is not at all a security feature. It is not intended to forbid people from malfunctioning your data. Excel uses simple encryption for worksheet protection which can be broken very easily.
In older versions, it doesn’t even matter how complicated your password was, it was still breakable with just the basic knowledge of VBA in minutes.
The later version of Excel 2013 and 2016 used more refined methods of sheet protection, but they were also defenseless and the security can be broken without even knowing the right password. Still, we are so inclined toward Excel and its functioning. Here are some tips,
- Secure your sheets with strong passwords that include alternative alphabets, and numerical and special symbols.
- For workbook security to prevent others from moving, adding, renaming, and deleting your sheets, use workbook-level security.
- Store your Excel files with hypersensitive data or information in a secure location like on encrypted hardware.
How to protect Excel sheets
- Right-click a worksheet tab and select Protect sheet from the menu.
- While setting up the password, try to remember it or note it somewhere but never save your passwords.
- If any accidental modification happened by you or any of your teammates then it’s nothing to worry about. It just takes a single click to unprotect the worksheets.
- After setting the password it shows allowance permission to what can be modified by others.
- Select some of the options which you are okay with and permit others to modify.
- Click OK.
- The confirm password space will appear, retype the password and select OK. That’s all.
- But the unintentional misspell will lock your excel sheet forever. Be aware of it.
How to unprotect Excel sheet with password:
- Right-click the worksheet tab, and click on unprotect sheet from the menu.
- On the Review tab, in the Changes group, select unprotect sheet.
- In the cell group which is on the home tab, click format and select unprotect sheet.
If you have protected the worksheet with the password, then enter the password and unlock it.
If the worksheet was not protected with a password, then just clicking on the unprotect sheet itself will do.
Tip!
- If your Excel file contains more than two protected sheets, process the macro individually to each sheet to unprotect it.
This is how you protect the Excel sheet and secure the entire workbook from malfunctions. To remove the password protection, go through the same steps and delete the password and save the changes.
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