How to Protect an Excel Workbook?

Example of Protecting a Workbook in Excel

First, we will try to protect a workbook as a whole so that nobody can make any change in any of the worksheets or any cells without any password.

  • Go to the “File” tab and click on it. Once we click on the “File” tab, we can see various options. For example, we see a box protecting the workbook in the info section. It says that the workbook’s structure is locked to prevent any changes. If the workbook is not protected, the message would be as follows:

It says that the workbook’s structure is locked to prevent any changes.

In this example, we are using Excel version 2013, so we will protect the workbook’s structure and then try to change the name of worksheet 3, which we have named “Anand.” Now, we want to change it to “Aran.”

It is very simple.

  1. Click on “Protect Workbook” under the changes section in the “Review” tab.

2)  A dialog box pops up.

  1. We will enter the same password, “EDUCBA,” to protect our Excel workbook and click on “OK.”

  2. It asks us to re-enter the password. When we click on “OK,” the whole workbook is protected.

  3. Now, let us see what the original name of “Sheet 3” was earlier.

  4. As the workbook is protected, double-click on the sheet name. As a result, we get the following display message.

  5. We can also try to right-click on sheet 3 to see if we can change the sheet name by that method.

We can see that the “Rename,” “Insert,” “Delete,” or “Move,” and the “Copy” options have been disabled as we have protected the workbook.

  1. We can also try to add a new worksheet from the “plus” sign beside the worksheet named “ANAND,” but we can see that we cannot as the “+” sign is disabled.

After protecting the workbook’s structure, any user cannot make changes to the protected workbook’s structure.

Things to Remember

  • Protecting workbooks is different from protecting worksheets.In Excel version 2013 and above, we can only protect the workbook’s structure as the windows “Resize” option is disabled in the later versions.In Excel version 2010 and below, we can protect both structure and windows size options as resize available in the previous versions of Excel.It is advised to protect an Excel workbook with a password so that any other user cannot unprotect it easily and change the workbook’s structure.It is also recommended to remember the password, as once the password is lost, we cannot unprotect the Excel workbook again.

This article is a guide to Protect Workbook in Excel. We learn how to protect the workbook in Excel, practical examples, and downloadable Excel templates. You may learn more about Excel from the following articles: –

  • Excel VBA UnProtect SheetExcel Add Bullet PointsColumn Lock ExcelLock Cells ExcelInsert (Embed) an Object in Excel