06 Nov Protecting a cell range in Google Sheets

Using Google Sheets allows you to work collaboratively with your team mates. However, information can be important and you may want to protect this from being edited by those with access to your Sheet. Protecting your cells in Google Sheets can help you to preserve the important stuff, whilst still allowing your team mates to collaborate on the document where and when you need them to. 

To get started, you will need to make sure that anyone with access to the Sheet can edit. This is to make sure that your team mates can still edit all unprotected cells in the Sheet. You can make any exceptions to this by typing in specific contacts, and editing their permissions.

To get started with protecting your Sheet, you can highlight a particular column or row that you want to protect. Then visit ‘Tools’ in the menu bar and scroll down to ‘Protect sheet…’

You will then see a sidebar appear on the right hand side of the window. You will have the option to protect the sheet or a range, and in this case we will select ‘Range’. Your highlighted cells will already be selected here.

You can now choose a description for your protected cells – you can either make this the title of the cells or a warning to those trying to edit it!

Now, you want to set who can edit your protected cells. Click ‘Set permissions’ and change all those with access to the file, to be able to ‘Comment’ rather than edit, as this will keep your cells protected.

To save your permissions and protect your cells, save all your changes and hit ‘Done’ in the sidebar.

You can then view, edit and delete your protected cells from the sidebar. You can also protect other cell ranges and manage them all here.

For more tips and tricks like this, visit our Google Apps Tips blog.