How to Lock Cell in Google Sheets
Learn how to lock specific cells in Google Sheets to prevent unwanted edits, ensuring your data remains intact as you update your spreadsheet over time.
You're gonna learn how to lock a cell in Google sheets . Here we have 2023 sales and we want to lock each month as it goes. We don't want someone coming in here and changing this cell. We want to protect this cell and the sheet, but we only want to protect the cell. For instance, we are trying to enter all of the data for the entire year, but as each month goes, we don't want someone coming in and editing the past months. So here B2, we just want to lock B2. How do we do that? We're going to select B2 and we're going to make sure we have it selected on the tab name at the very bottom. Click the down arrow. We're going to hit protect sheet over here on the right. We can add a description if we want to. We can call it B2 or January sales. We can also, and we must change this to range . So Automatically it's selected as sheet, but we actually just want to protect a range, B2.
And notice that the B2 is already filled in here because we have B2 already selected. If we had selected some other cell, it would be the selected cell here. And all we have to do is click set permissions . Once we've selected this, we can now do one of two things. We can show a warning When this is edited, or we can restrict completely who has the ability to edit this. Show warning is interesting and sometimes is necessary if you just want to not stop someone, but slow them down from editing. But we definitely want to restrict someone from editing this range . We can select custom options, but I'm going to select only you, meaning only me, the person protecting the sheet. Click done. I'm the only one that can edit this now.
Now, if you want to get back to your protected cells and you want to either edit them or add to them or delete them. We can select our sheet, go to data , go to protect sheets and ranges . And here you can see this B two is already here. We can add more if we want. For instance, we may want to add B3 later on. You can add B3. Same here, we can name this February. Set permissions . Done. And now there are two options here. That's how to lock cells in Google Sheets . If you're looking to get more out of your Google Sheets than you've ever had before, consider subscribing here on YouTube to BetterSheets.