How to protect your Google Sheets data from edits

Google Sheets is a great tool to share information and to collaborate across teams. It makes it easy to keep all teams synced on a certain project or on certain datasets. However, there might be cases where you want to prevent users from editing parts of your Google Sheets data. It’s easy to do that with Sheets. In this quick article we show you how to protect your Google Sheets data from edit.

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If you’re working with sensitive data in a Google Sheets spreadsheet, you may want to lock certain tabs from being edited by other users. You can do that by protecting one or more of your sheets tabs.

To do so, select the tab you want to protect, open its settings by clicking on the arrow next to its title and select “protect the sheet”: 

A sidebar “protected sheets and ranges” will now show up. This will allow you to manage your data protection. You can now choose to protect either a range of cells within your sheet or the whole tab. 

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Protect a specific range

If you only want to protect a range of cells, choose the “Range” option on the sidebar that shows up:

Select the range of cells you want to protect and then Set permissions. Here you have two options. You can choose to simply show a warning message when someone edits the range you selected (by selecting “Show a warning when editing this range”), or restrict the editing permission to specific accounts, by selecting “Restrict who can edit this range”. 

You can repeat this operation for as many ranges as you want, by simply clicking on “+ Add a sheet or range” on the sidebar.

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Protect a whole Sheet

If you want to protect a whole sheet, click on the “Sheet” option in your “protected sheets and ranges” sidebar. Here you can select the specific sheet you want to protect and you can even exclude from protection some specific cells.

Once you are done, you can Set permissions.

Here again, you can set up whether to simple show a warning message to users when they edit your sheet, or enter a specific list of people who are authorised to edit it. 

In this instance too, you can repeat this operation for as many sheets as you want, by simply clicking on “+ Add a sheet or range” on the sidebar.

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Protecting your Google Sheets data from unwanted edits is easy. With the simple steps outlined in this article, you can easily protect ranges of cells or whole sheets from being edited. This will make sure your data remains secure, and that only specific people can make changes to it.

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