Excel 2019 Bible

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C H A P T E R

34

Protecting Your Work

IN THIS CHAPTER

Protecting worksheets

Protecting workbooks

Protecting Visual Basic Projects

Creating PDFs and checking documents

T

he concept of “protection” gets a lot of attention in the Excel forums. It seems that many users

want to learn how to protect various workbook elements from being overwritten or copied.

Excel has several protection-related features, and those features are covered in this chapter.

Types of Protection

Excel’s protection-related features fall into three categories:

Worksheet protection Protecting all or part of a worksheet from being modified or restricting the

modifications to certain users

Workbook protection Protecting a workbook from having sheets inserted or deleted and requir-

ing the use of a password to open the workbook

Visual Basic (VB) protection Using a password to prevent others from viewing or modifying your

VBA code

Before we discuss these features, you should understand the limitations of security. Using a password to protect

some aspect of your work doesn’t guarantee that it’s secure. Password-cracking utilities (and some simple tricks)

have been around for a long time. Using passwords works in the majority of cases, but if unscrupulous individuals are

truly intent on getting to your data, they can usually find a way. If security is critical, perhaps Excel isn’t the proper

tool.

Excel® 2019 Bible, First Edition. Michael Alexander, Dick Kusleika and John Walkenbach.
© 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.