The document discusses how to selectively lock and unlock cells in Excel to allow editing of certain cells while protecting others. Specifically, it addresses a question about leaving yellow cells unprotected so the user can tab between them to easily enter data. It explains how to use cell formatting and the Find feature to quickly select and unlock all yellow cells before protecting the sheet. This allows tabbing between the yellow cells while preventing edits to other locked cells.
The document discusses how to selectively lock and unlock cells in Excel to allow editing of certain cells while protecting others. Specifically, it addresses a question about leaving yellow cells unprotected so the user can tab between them to easily enter data. It explains how to use cell formatting and the Find feature to quickly select and unlock all yellow cells before protecting the sheet. This allows tabbing between the yellow cells while preventing edits to other locked cells.
The document discusses how to selectively lock and unlock cells in Excel to allow editing of certain cells while protecting others. Specifically, it addresses a question about leaving yellow cells unprotected so the user can tab between them to easily enter data. It explains how to use cell formatting and the Find feature to quickly select and unlock all yellow cells before protecting the sheet. This allows tabbing between the yellow cells while preventing edits to other locked cells.
excel sheet so we're going to take a look at the basics but the case that we're dealing with today has a twist this was a question from one of my students Anya who asked I'd like to leave yellow cells unprotected is there a way without a VBA macro to get this done this way I can move from one unprotected yellow cell to the next one with a tab key and it would save me a lot of time entering data can we do this without VBA first off let's cover the basics for protecting can done protecting your worksheets you do that in the review tab under protect here you can protect the entire sheet by clicking on this you probably would want to give this a password and you have to confirm that password everything is fully protected so if you try to input anywhere in this sheet you get this pop up that is protected and the user can only unprotect it if they know the password now in addition to this you have the ability to unprotect some of the cells and leave the other ones protected you can do it in different ways one method is to use allow edit ranges then this gives you some additional options so you can set different passwords for different ranges but in case we just want a simple solution all we have to do is to select the cells that we don't want protected right mouse click go to format cells or use the shortcut key control 1 under protection here you need to take away the checkmark beside locked once you do this nothing happens until you protect the worksheet at this point nothing is protected I can input Everywhere's I can input here and I can input here this kicks in the moment you protect the sheet so now I'm going to go click on protect this time I'm just not going to give it a password and click on OK so when I attempt to input something here it's still protected I can't input but I should be able to input here and I can and of course you can select different areas and take away that tick mark to have the different areas unprotected once the sheet is protected so let me unprotect this and just put back that check mark for all the cells so when you get this symbol in there it means there is a mix some cells are protected some cells aren't I'm just going to put back to check mark to go back to the original default state now let's come to the complex case my aim is to protect all the cells here except the yellow cells these cells are going to be my input cells and normally when you have an Excel table and you're inputting data so let's say I put 23 I press tab that takes me to the next cell tab takes me to the next cell when I protect these gray cells and I leave the yellow ones unprotected this means when I press tab inside a yellow cell it's going to jump to the next unprotected cell which is going to be this yellow cell and then this yellow cell what I want to do is to unprotect all the yellow cells the time-consuming way of doing this is to manually select all these yellow cells so hold down the control key select them and then take away that checkmark but this is going to cost me a lot of time if I have to do this on a large area like this one the faster way of doing this is this we're gonna highlight the range where we're going to be inputting data and we're going to use the find feature so let's press ctrl F under options here we get the ability to add a specific format select choose format from cell and go to one of these yellow cells now just keep in mind that when you take the cell formatting in this way it doesn't just take into account the color but the entire formatting of the cells are also the number formatting that's behind this click on find all it finds everything here and I want to highlight it in my spreadsheet so I'm gonna press ctrl a to highlight these results which is gonna end up highlighting them on the sheet right here and let's just close our dialog box now what I'm going to do is use the shortcut key control 1 to go back to format cell go to protection take away the checkmark beside locked click on ok now let's protect the sheet this time I'm not gonna give it a password and let's test let's input a number here and press tab jumps to the next yellow cell tab tab this way I can input data so much easier so this is my approach if you can think of any other methods share it with me in the comments below this was our locking and unlocking Thursday fun if you liked it give it a thumbs up and if you haven't subscribed to this channel and you want to improve your Excel skills consider subscribing [Music] you