Forum Discussion
Protected sheets with unlocked cells shows all cells as protected in Excel Online
Hi, I first noticed this today with Excel Online. I have a workbook with a protected sheet, some cells are locked and some aren't. On the desktop, this works fine. On Excel Online, when editing cells on the protected sheet, as of today it says the cell is protected, even when it's not part of the set of cells that are locked.
Under 'Review - Manage Protection' in Excel Online, there is a new(?) option to add editable ranges, but this isn't visible in Excel Desktop. This seems to override this behaviour where unlocked cells on a locked spreadsheet can't be edited in Excel Online.
Is this an intended change to the way these locked cells on protected sheets work for Excel Online, or is it a bug that has been introduced? Is this the correct venue for reporting something like this? There is a Reddit thread started earlier today that first noted this, I've been using this functionality as described (protected sheets with locked and unlocked ranges) for over a year this way with no issues, with this change happening today: https://www.reddit.com/r/excel/comments/18laym6/office_365_issue_with_cells_randomly_locked/.
Thanks,
Rob
Seems to be fixed for me as well. Go team!
18 Replies
- We have the same issues in our company.
The weird thing is that it's not affecting all users. For some users it's working as usual and other users can't do anything anymore as it seems that the unlocked cells are locked for them. So for those users I need to unprotect the full sheet to have them do their work.
I hope this can be fixed as soon as possible because we really rely on excel online where we have 20 excel tabs open at the same time.
Or if we need to change the process then hopefully someone from Microsoft can tell us what to change to have our protected excel files workable again in excel online.Exactly the same behavior for us, appears random, it's random cells that are inaccessible. It started for me and I could select 3 cells in one row but the rest of the rows were fine. Very weird behavior. I ended up having to use the online Manage Protection to add a range, even though they are not locked via cell formatting, and then locked the sheets. That resolved it for online use. However you have to do that for every sheet and every cell you want them to have access to. So unpleasant if you have a lot. I had 2 workbooks and a total of about 10 sheets to update. Everyone is able to continue using them online now. Hope Microsoft fixes this soon.
This same thing is happening to us. It started at the end of last week but not for all the users or all the Excel files. It seems that opening the Excel file on their desktop seemed to work.
This is a serious functionality error in the application that, if files are to be used, leaves the sheets unprotected, turning it into a serious security breach.
Yes this same thing is happening to us. It started end of last week and having the user open the application on their desktop and syncing seemed to work but now I'm able to replicate the issue myself and syncing is not helping anymore. I can either leave the sheet unlocked or have users open them in the app instead of the browser. Not sure what happened recently to change the behavior.
