

Without protecting the sheet, there’s no way to truly hide the formulas other than to hide the Formula bar. Next, I’ll show you how to hide the Formula bar. However, it doesn’t disable Show Formulas or the Formula bar. Protecting a sheet disables many options. Figure A Use Show Formulas to see all formulas. Or, press Ctrl+` (that’s the backtick character below the tilde character). Simply click the Formulas tab and then click Show Formulas in the Formula Auditing group. In addition, to see all formulas at once, as shown in Figure A, you can use the Show Formulas option. You can see formulas in the Formula bar or by pressing F2 for in-cell editing. When creating a sheet, you need the ability to enter and modify data and formulas, so everything’s visible and accessible by default. It really is that easy, so don’t make the mistake of thinking a protected sheet is secure. For instance, did you know that anyone can copy data from a protected Excel sheet into another workbook or even Google Sheets to access protected data? Excel protection is lost once data is copied somewhere else. It won’t protect sensitive and confidential data from falling into the wrong hands. Protection is meant to prevent well-meaning users from accidentally damaging your work. Excel protection isn’t a security feature. It’s important to clarify the difference between protection and security. SEE: Software Usage Policy (Tech Pro Research) Let’s begin with a warning There’s no demonstration file you won’t need one. Protection is partially supported by the browser edition, but you can’t implement or disable it in the browser. Protection has been around for a long time though, so you can implement what you learn in older versions.

I’m using Office 365’s Excel 2016 (desktop) on a Windows 10 64-bit system. How to return first and last times from timestamps in Microsoft ExcelĬhecklist: Microsoft 365 app and services deployments on Macs Get Microsoft Office Pro and lifetime access to 5 top apps for $59.99 ( Note: This article about protecting Excel formulas is available as a free PDF download.) More about Software The good news is that protecting and hiding Excel formulas is a simple process and I’ll show you how to do so in this article. Usually, you’ll do so to protect proprietary and conditional information. Beyond protecting, sometimes you’ll need to hide formulas altogether. Fortunately, using Excel’s Protection feature, you can prevent users from inflicting accidental damage. You don’t want users accidentally changing formulas and impacting the purpose of your work. Image: Photographer: Andrey Popov, Getty Images/iStockphotoįormulas are one of the most important components of an Excel sheet and as such, deserve–warrant–protection. You worked hard to put that Excel sheet together, now protect it from unintended damage.
