Forum Discussion
Sort In Protected Worksheets
Hi, the tricky bit is that allowing Sort during protection is not enough by itself if Excel still sees locked cells in the sort range. In practice, the cells included in the sort usually need to be unlocked before protecting the sheet, and then you protect the sheet with Sort and AutoFilter allowed. If the table has formulas you do not want edited, one workaround is to protect formula columns separately and let users sort through filtered table headers.
Jamony,
I know it is tricky. What I don't understand is why is there a protection option to allow sort on a protected worksheet - but it doesn't work? If MIcrosoft can't make it work - remove the option. If they can make it work, make it work. But why leave an option that doesn't work?
All (at least most) the work arounds talk about protecting some cells, like formulas, and not others. That is fine - I know how to do that. In my case, I want all the data protected. A complex series of processes add data to a table in a spreadsheet. We want all staff to be able to see the data, but only a few select people to be able to edit. But we do want them to be able to explore the data by filtering (works) and sorting (doesn't work).
I can work around this - I spend my whole life working around Microsoft short comings. But wouldn't it be better if Microsoft just fixed the root problem for everyone!
Thank you for your comment.
Guy
