MS-Excel / Excel 2003

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Removing protection from a worksheet

When you turn on protection in a worksheet, your data input and editing are restricted solely to unlocked cells in the sheet, and you can perform only those additional actions that you enabled in the Allow Users of this Worksheet To list box. If you try to replace, delete, or otherwise modify a locked cell in the protected worksheet (assuming that the Select Locked Cells check box is selected), Excel displays an alert dialog box with the following message:

The cell or chart you are trying to change is protected and therefore read-only

The message then goes on to tell you that to modify a protected worksheet, you must first remove the protection by choosing the Tools → Protection → Unprotect Sheet command. If you've assigned a password to unprotect the sheet, the program displays the Unprotect Sheet dialog box where you must enter the password exactly as you assigned it. After you enter the correct password and click OK, Excel turns off the protection in the sheet, and you can once again make any modifications to its structure and contents in both the locked and unlocked cells.

When you protect a worksheet, only the data and graphics on that particular sheet are protected. This means that you can mess with the contents of other sheets of the same workbook without removing protection. To protect the contents on another sheet, you need to activate it and then repeat the entire procedure for protecting it as well (including unlocking cells that need to be edited and selecting which other formatting options to enable in the worksheet and whether or not to assign a password to unprotect the sheet) before distributing the workbook.