In this article, we will show you how to protect your Google Sheets and improve its security.
Why Protect Your Google Sheets
Your Google spreadsheets might contain important inputs that you don’t want to change. However, you might have no choice but to share the sheet for various reasons, starting with simply reading it down to writing data into it.
Sometimes, you might even need to remove the default access restriction placed on your Google Sheets so that anyone can access it.
In that case, you need to prevent the accidental modification of important cells. These can be cells that show some calculations or those that other cells containing calculated outputs depend upon.
Regardless of the situation, protecting your sheet prevents anyone from editing its contents. By locking your sheet, anyone without writing permission can only access and read it, not edit it.
How to Protect the Entire Google Sheets
While protecting your Google Sheets, you can choose to either prevent anyone except yourself from editing it or choose to grant editing permission to some people. Let’s see how you can go about either option:
Prevent Anyone Except You From Editing Your Google Sheets
Here’s how to prevent others except you from updating your sheet:
From the top ribbon of Google Sheets, click Tools. Select Protect the sheet from the options. Fill in the optional Enter a description field. Select the sheet you want to protect from the sheets option dropdown below the description box. Click Set permissions. To cap the editing permission to only you: tick Restrict who can edit this range. From the dropdown below it, select Only you. Click Done to effect the changes. Then finally, click Done again.
Grant Editing Permission to Selected People
As mentioned earlier, you can choose who can write to your Google Sheets. To do this, you only need to update the permission settings in your Google Sheets and grant them access through their email address:
Click Tools > Select Protect the sheet > enter a description. Choose the sheet you want to protect from the dropdown. Click Set permissions. Then, select Restrict who can edit this range. Choose Custom from the dropdown. Tick the email addresses you want to grant write permission to if you’ve previously shared your Google Sheets with them. If your choice email address isn’t on the list, then type or paste it in the Add editors field. You can add more than one email address at a time. But ensure that you separate them with a comma. Hit Done when satisfied.
Note: If you’ve listed some email addresses in the Add editors field, you can go ahead and share your Google Sheets with them if you’ve not done so already. That’s it for locking your entire Google Sheets.
Set Soft Warning for Editing Cells
Sometimes, your sheet may contain sensitive data that you don’t want to modify yourself. For instance, it could even be data coming from Google Forms into your Google Sheets.
While you can’t lock yourself out from editing sheets you own, you can tell Google to spin up a soft warning each time you try to edit some sheets. This lets you prevent yourself from accidentally editing such sheets, or at least get a warning before doing so.
That’s even helpful if you manage many sheets at a time and you want to keep a tab of the ones you don’t want to change. It’s also a great option to consider if you don’t share your Google Sheets with outsiders.
Here’s how to set a soft warning before editing your Google Sheets:
Click Tools. Go to Protect the sheet. Choose Set permissions. Select Show a warning when editing this range. Click Done to save the changes.
However, a disadvantage of this option is that anyone can still edit your sheet, even if they don’t have write permission. That’s because Google only shows a warning before further editing. So people can always proceed to edit it anyways.
Here’s the warning you get each time you or anyone tries to write to your Google Sheets:
How to Lock Selected Cells in Google Sheets
While you’ve permitted some people to edit your sheet, you might still want to prevent them from updating some cells or columns in the sheet. Here’s how to do that:
From the sheet’s ribbon, click Data. Select Protected sheets and ranges. Click Add a sheet or range. Fill in the Enter a description field. You’ll see a field below the description box prefilled with a default data range. Click the small box to the right of that range. Type in the cell you want to protect. For instance, to protect cell G3, type Sheet!G3. To protect a range of cells, put a colon after the initial cell like this: Sheet!B3:. Then type in the cell where you want the protection to cover: Sheet!B3:F14. For example, to protect an entire column, you can use Sheet!G1:G40. This also applies to an entire row. Alternatively, you can highlight the cells you want to protect and it will reflect in the range field. But this isn’t quite practical when you have many rows or columns. Click OK when you’re done setting your cell range. Click Set permissions to set your write permission preferences as you like using the steps we highlighted earlier. Finally, click Done.
How to Exempt Some Cells From Protection in Google Sheets
If you want to lock the majority of your cells and leave a few of them open for updates, you can exempt those few cells from protection and put a lock on the rest:
Click Tools. Select Protect the sheet. Look below the sheet options dropdown and put a tick on Except certain cells. Click the small box to the right of the prefilled range. Type the cell range you want to exempt from protection in the range field: for instance, type C3 to exempt the third cell of the third column only. Or type A3:C3 to exempt the third cell of the first column up to the third cell on the third column. Go ahead and click Set permissions. Then use the steps we highlighted earlier to set your write permissions. Click Done when satisfied with the exemption.
How to Remove Protection From Your Google Sheets
If you don’t want to protect your Google Sheets anymore, you can also remove the permissions you’ve set earlier. That’s quite easy:
On the Google Sheets ribbon, click Data Go to Protected sheets and ranges You’ll see the description of the protection you set earlier as its identity. Click that! Look to the right of the description and click the delete icon. Finally, click Remove.
Handle Your Google Sheets Like a Pro
Now that you know how to set different permissions for Google Sheets, you can share it with others, knowing that they can’t change your data unless you grant them permission to do so. You can do this with organizational sheets you manage alone or with a team.
