Data security is crucial in today’s digital environment, especially when working with spreadsheets and sensitive information. Various measures are available in the powerful cloud-based spreadsheet program Google Sheets to safeguard your data from unauthorized access and unintentional changes. Sheet protection is one such tool that enables you to lock particular sheets inside of your Google Sheets documents.
Sheet protection is a crucial weapon in your toolbox if you wish to protect private financial information, stop unintentional changes to necessary calculations, or restrict access to particular sheets within a group project. In this post, the method of locking a sheet in Google Sheets has been explained step-by-step.
What is meant by Locking a Sheet in Google Sheets?
Locking a sheet in Google Sheets means that one can secure particular spreadsheet sheets using the useful feature of sheet protection in Google Sheets. It provides protection from unauthorized access, unintentional changes, and potential data damage. Also, one can safeguard the confidentiality of the data, maintain the integrity of the spreadsheet, and manage who can view and update its contents by using sheet protection.
In order to further secure your sheets, sheet protection also includes features like password protection. You can further limit access by setting a password, which makes sure that only people with the right password can edit the protected documents.
How to Lock a Sheet in Google Sheets?
To lock a sheet in Google Sheets, there are majorly two different methods:
- Using the “Protect sheets and ranges” feature
- Using the “Set permissions” feature
Method 1: Lock a Sheet in Google Sheets Using the “Protect sheets and ranges” feature
To lock a sheet in Google Sheets using the “Protect sheets and ranges” features, one can protect the specific sheets as well as ranges within a sheet. To understand this, consider the sheet, named “Result of Class I” in Google Sheets:
Now, we will use the “Protect sheets and ranges” to lock this sheet by the steps mentioned below.
Step 1: Select the Sheet or the range to lock in Google Sheets
First, select either the entire sheet by clicking on it or some specific ranges of cells to lock them. We will select the entire sheet of “Result of Class I” to lock it:
Step 2: Choose the “Protect sheets and ranges” Feature in Google Sheets
After selecting the sheets, click on “Data” in the menu tab and then choose “Protect sheets and ranges” from the drop-down menu:
Step 3: Set up the Protection Option in Google Sheets
Now, the menu of the “Protect sheet and ranges” will be open on the side of the sheet, click on the “+ Add a sheet or range”:
Then you can click on the “Range” if you are planning to lock the specific range of the cells:
If you want to lock the entire sheet in Google Sheets, then we will click on the “Sheet”:
After choosing the sheet name which in our case is “Result of Class I”, click on “Set Permission”. You can also lock the sheet by keeping some cells unlock by checking the option “Except certain cells” and specifying those cells, but in this example, we will lock the complete sheet:
Now from the open menu, you can allow the users who can access and edit the Sheet of Google Sheets. You can also use the option of “Show a warning when editing this range” and then click on the “Done” button.
Method 2: Lock a Sheet in Google Sheets Using the “Set permissions” feature
Another way to lock the sheet is by sharing the sheet with specified users and with specified permissions. To utilize this feature, click on the “Share” button on the top right corner of the sheet:
A dialog box appears showing the current permissions of the file, now you can add the users by their email addresses who can access this sheet:
Once the user or users with whom the sheet is going to be shared are chosen, click on the drop-down menu to define their role:
In this way, the shared sheets are considered to be a lock for unauthorized users in Google Sheets.
Conclusion
To lock a sheet in Google Sheets, choose the sheet by clicking on its name. Then go to “Data” in the menu tab and choose “Protect sheets and ranges” to lock a sheet. Another way to lock the sheet is by sharing the sheet with the specified users having defined roles. Both methods are explained in the step-by-step guide along with a demonstration of the example.
