Excel formulas are easy to create and edit in Excel. You can easily edit a formula through the formula bar or directly in the cell. While this makes it convenient to create formulas in Excel, it comes with a few disadvantages as well. Consider this.

Quick keys for word on mac computer. Video editing software for mac reviews. Show formulas in the cells of an Excel spreadsheet to make it easy to find cells that contain formulas, or to check for errors. Excel for Office 365 for Mac, Excel 2019 for Mac, Excel 2016 for Mac. Make sure the sheet is enabled to show formulas.

You are going through a worksheet full of formulas, and you accidently hit the delete key, or backspace key, or some other number/alphabet key. Now you’ll be lucky if you’re able to spot the error and correct it.

But if you are not, it may lead to some erroneous results. And let me tell you this, errors in Excel have cost millions to companies (read or ). The chances of such errors increase multifold when you share a file with colleagues or managers or clients.

One of the ways to prevent this from happening is to. However, doing this would prevent the user from making any changes to the worksheet. For example, if you’re sending a workbook to your manager for review, you may want to allow him to add his comments or change some cells. A better workaround to this is to lock only those cells that have formulas in it.

By default, all the cells are locked in Excel. Only when you protect the locked cells can you truly restrict the user from making changes. This also means that if a cell is not locked and you protect it, the user would be able to make changes. Here are the steps to lock formulas in Excel (explained in detail later on): • Select all the cells and unlock these. • Select all the cells that have formulas (using Go To Special). • Lock these selected cells. • Protect the worksheet.

Now that I have outlined the steps above, let’s dive in and see how to do this (and more importantly, why we must do this): Step 1: Select All the Cells and Unlock it While you may find it confusing, bear with me and keep reading. As I mentioned, only the cells that are locked as well as protected can truly be restricted.

If all the cells are locked, and I protect the entire worksheet, it would mean a user can’t change anything. But we only want to lock (restrict access) to the cells that have formulas in it. To do this, we first need to unlock all the cells and then select and lock only those cells that have formulas in it. Here are the steps to unlock all the cells: • Select all the cells in the worksheet (use the keyboard shortcut Control + A). • Use the keyboard shortcut Control + 1 (hold the Control key and then press 1).

This will open the format cells dialog box. • In the format cells dialog box, select the Protection tab. • Uncheck the ‘Locked’ option. Step 2: Select All the Cells that Have Formulas Now that all the cells have been unlocked, we need to make sure that the cells that have formulas are locked. To do this, we need to first select all the cells with formulas. Here are the steps to select all the cells that have formulas: • Select all the cells in the worksheet (use Control + A). • Go to Home and within the Editing group, click on Find & Select.