First, worksheet protection is easily broken. So this won't stop anyone who
wants to unprotect the worksheet.

By default (unless you've changes something), each cell is locked. You can
toggle this setting by:
Select the range
Format|Cells|Protection tab|check or uncheck Locked

If you have lots of cells that should be unlocked, and just a few that should be
locked, you can select all the cells. Change all of them to what you want.
Then select the "opposite" group and change the setting to the other way.

But the lockedness of a cell doesn't really mean much until you protect the
sheet.

Tools|Protection|protect sheet
Give it a memorable password (even though this is easy to break, you don't want
to waste your time finding how).

Now test a few cells. The locked cells can't be changed by the user. The
unlocked cells can.

In xl2003, there's a bunch of options when you use that tools|protection|protect
sheet dialog.

You can allow the user to format cells, insert/delete rows or columns... I
think that these were added in xl2002. If you're supporting xl2k and below, you
won't want to use those -- no matter how tempting they may be!

=====
Now that you've seen how locked cells (and unlocked cells) behave on a protected
sheet, try doing some of the things that you expect the users to be able to do.

Lots of features are disabled on protected sheets and you may find that even
though the formulas are safe, other stuff won't work.

And if you share the workbook, the solutions to many of these problems disappear
-- it's take it or leave it.

MAD wrote:

I am using Excel 2003
I have a spreadsheet report that contains lots of formulas. There are
several people who have access to this spreadsheet. Lately a couple of my
formulas got mixed up. So I want to be able to lock up certain cells so that
no one but me can change them. Does anyone know where I can find a tutorial
on how to lock certain cells to keep them from being changed. I would
appreciate any help you can give me.

Aurora

--

Dave Peterson