Google Sheets gives users the option of limiting access to specific cells or password protecting them. Learn how to do this!

Protecting your Google Sheets lets you avoid unprecedented changes to existing data. Aside from protecting your sheet, you can also customize how people write into it by tweaking the editing permissions.

In this article, we will show you how to protect your Google Sheets and improve its security.

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.

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:

Here's how to prevent others except you from updating your sheet:

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:

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.

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.

Related: How to Integrate Google Forms With 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:

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.

Related: Google Sheets Keyboard Shortcuts for Windows and Mac

Here's the warning you get each time you or anyone tries to write to your 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:

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:

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:

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.

Idowu took writing as a profession in 2019 to communicate his programming and overall tech skills. At MUO, he covers coding explainers on several programming languages, cyber security topics, productivity, and other tech verticals. Idowu holds an MSc in Environmental Microbiology. But he sought out values outside his field to learn how to program and write technical explainers, enhancing his skill set. And he hasn't looked back since then.

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