

In this tutorial, you're going to see that there are really two unique approaches to adding spreadsheet protections: You'll see me apply some of the protection tools to ensure that no unintended changes are made to your spreadsheets. Let's walk through the key techniques to protect cells in a Google spreadsheet in this screencast.

How to Protect Google Sheets (Watch & Learn) In general, spreadsheets often contain important calculations that you'll want to ensure are protected from unwanted edits and preserve the integrity of the calculations.Īny of these are reason enough to learn Sheets cell protections.

If you're going to share your spreadsheet with a large audience, it helps if you can "user-proof" the Sheet by locking key cells and ensuring that they aren't accidentally modified.In those cases, keeping the inputs protected makes sense. Many spreadsheets are structured with "input" cells where you set key variables, and other calculation cells that are based on those inputs.That's the focus of this tutorial, and here are some reasons why you might want to do that instead of just preventing access to the spreadsheet altogether:

For Sheets, that means that you can control who has a link to view or edit the workbook.īut you can also protect the Sheets and workbooks to control the changes that can be made to the spreadsheet. If you want to control who can access the spreadsheet, you need to think about Google spreadsheet permissions. You'll also learn sheet protection to ensure that critical data is never removed from your spreadsheets. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to lock cells in Google Sheets. Why is Google spreadsheet security important? Whether the changes are on purpose or accidental, the best way to prevent them is to implement hard controls in the spreadsheet that leaves your data locked to changes.
