If Gord's suggestion and offer of assistance isn't what you need, then things
get a little flakey for you: In order to sort on a protected sheet, all of
the cells that may potentially be involved in the sort must be unlocked.
Quite often this defeats at least part of the purpose of protecting the sheet
in the first place. As Gord said, the typical way to handle this enigma is
via VBA code that unprotects the sheet, does the sort and then puts the sheet
back into protected mode.

"Blue Max" wrote:

How do we configure our worksheet so that we can turn protection ON, but
still enable the table filter buttons in order to sort columns in a table?

No matter what settings we select for protection, including the sort and
auto-filter options, we cannot sort tables on a protected sheet. What is
the secret to allowing table sorts on a protected sheet?

.