Forum Discussion
Excel Protection vanishes
I'm seeing the same issue and it doesn't seem to be resolved with any updates.
We have about 5 employees accessing the same sheet saved in Sharepoint. Typically they access through Teams, but occasionally some may access through the web app.
As best I can tell when someone inputs data in an unlocked cell on a protected sheet it just turns off the protection entirely. All sheets are password protected, and no one knows the password other than myself, but that doesn't seem to be an issue with the app turning off protection.
Is anyone else still seeing this behavior? I'm needing a good fix for this or at least an understanding of what causes the problem to see if there is a workaround. If there's no solution it may render the entire application unusable. Can't be dealing with someone accidentally deleting the entire worksheet because they didn't know they could do that.
dcg00 I'm having a similar problem and I'm starting to think it's a bug. If I lock my sheet in excel and spam click on locked cell, eventually it allows me to type in (and see) the locked cell. This shocked me and was a bit embarrassing (I was only spam clicking to show a colleague that the cell could not be erroneously edited by a user), but what was more shocking was that when I looked up to the top, my spreadsheet had become unprotected without me entering in a password. That absolutely blew my mind. I have repeated this several times as well as saved the worksheet and it still does it. This is not possible in the older versions of the worksheet before I enabled macros. There are 3 macros that do a bit of formatting thus the first line of the macros unprotects the sheet, then it executes, then it reprotects it at the end... but all of the macros require pushing buttons and the cell in question is nowhere near those buttons, nor is it directly or indirectly referenced in any of the macros (it's not even in a range in the macro). I cannot for the life of me figure out what is happening.
Thankfully, this is only happening in the developmental version of the spreadsheet; clicking the same cell repeatedly in the live version takes you to the middle of the spreadsheet. THIS IS A HUGE PROBLEM because I frequently have to deal w/ client budgets, and I've had issues w/ them sending me their own spreadsheets which don't properly work and with them inadvertently editing formulas in my spreadsheets. This spreadsheet is ~25x250 cells and 90% of them either include formulas, are used in formulas, or determine which formulas are used. I absolutely cannot take the time to review every single formula in the spreadsheet every single time someone sends me a budget; that's the whole point of protection. I would really, really appreciate some input here. This really feels like a bug.