how to lock the formatting in excel for mac 2011

Lock The Formatting In Excel 2011 How To Do So

Its great to know that you can hide the Formula bar but doing so wont protect formulas.

You dont want users accidentally changing formulas and impacting the purpose of your work.

Fortunately, using Excels Protection feature, you can prevent users from inflicting accidental damage.

Beyond protecting, sometimes youll need to hide formulas altogether.

Usually, youll do so to protect proprietary and conditional information.

Lock The Formatting In Excel 2011 How To Do So

The good news is that protecting and hiding Excel formulas is a simple process and Ill show you how to do so in this article.

Note: This article about protecting Excel formulas is available as a free PDF download.).

Protection has been around for a long time though, so you can implement what you learn in older versions.

Protection is partially supported by the browser edition, but you cant implement or disable it in the browser.

SEE: Software Usage Policy (Tech Pro Research) Lets begin with a warning.

Protection is meant to prevent well-meaning users from accidentally damaging your work.

It wont protect sensitive and confidential data from falling into the wrong hands.

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 really is that easy, so dont make the mistake of thinking a protected sheet is secure.

You can see formulas in the Formula bar or by pressing F2 for in-cell editing.

In addition, to see all formulas at once, as shown in Figure A, you can use the Show Formulas option.

Simply click the Formulas tab and then click Show Formulas in the Formula Auditing group.

Or, press Ctrl (thats the backtick character below the tilde character).

Usually, you wont want to disable the Formula bar unless viewers are working with a read-only file.

To hide the Formula bar, simply click the View tab and then uncheck Formula Bar in the Show group.

However, hiding the Formula bar wont protect your formulas from being modified or viewed: Show Formulas will still toggle the formulas and their results.

A user can enable the Formula bar just as easily as you disabled it.

Pressing F2 to engage in-cell editing also displays the formula and allows users to make changes.

Its worth noting that you can disable the Formula bar via Excels Advanced options (via the File menu).

Keep in mind that a user can change this option as easily as you did.

How To Lock The Formatting In Excel For Mac 2011