Docs · guide

How to lock cells in Google Sheets, and what it will not do

By Alberto Gulotta · Updated 4 September 2026 · 10 min read

The steps for how to lock cells in google sheets are four clicks and you will find them anywhere: Data › Protect sheets and ranges, choose the range, set permissions, save. This guide is about the two things that come before and after — what Google says the feature is for, and the two things it states you cannot do with it.

That difference is larger than it looks, because it is the reason the Excel question gets searched so often. There the steps appear not to work: every cell is already Locked, ticking the box changes nothing, and the sheet stays editable until protection is switched on — so the Excel guide is mostly about doing the job the other way round. Here there is no other way round. You protect what you mean and name the exceptions.

Both of those are Google’s own words, listed under an Important note before the instructions. The first changes what the feature can be used for at all, and it is the one to carry across from Excel: a protected Excel sheet asks for a password, and somebody who does not have it stops there. A protected Sheets range asks who you are, and the answer is already known — which is why the sentence at the top of this page is not a disclaimer but a description.

Excel draws the same line in the opposite order. In Microsoft’s spreadsheet every cell is locked from the start and the protection is dormant until you turn it on, so the work is unlocking the cells people are meant to fill in and then protecting the sheet. Sheets starts from the other end: nothing is protected until you name a range. Different defaults, same outcome — a document where the inputs are editable and the formulas are not, and in neither program a barrier that survives someone copying the file.

One last thing, and it is the fastest to check. If Protected sheets and ranges is not in the Data menu at all, Google’s answer is that you are probably in Microsoft Office editing — the mode Sheets uses to work on an .xlsx directly — and the protection tools arrive when the file is converted to Google Sheets. It is a two-second diagnosis for a menu item that appears to have gone missing.

Not covered here. It will not call this security. Google does not, in the first sentence of its own documentation, and repeating the word would be the useful part left out.

It will not offer a password. There is not one, and Google lists its absence rather than leaving you to discover it.

And it will not treat hiding a sheet as an alternative. A viewer can copy the file and unhide everything in it, which Google spells out with an example. What holds instead is simple: the warning that protection is not a security measure, the two stated impossibilities, the range and sheet routes with Except certain cells, the warning and restrict models with their options, the striped view of protected ranges, the note that hiding is not protecting and what a viewer can still do, and the Microsoft Office editing case are quoted from Google’s own Docs Editors help, listed below with the date it was read.