OpenOffice Calc Tips

There are a number of situations where it is desirable to take advantage of the sheet/cell protectection features of OOo Calc.

Perhaps you want to prevent the values for a range of cells from being overwritten. Perhaps, you want to protect sensitive financial formulae but share the results.

In order for protection settings to be enabled for a range of cells, the document or sheet must be protected. Protecting a sheet or document prevents the format of the cells from being changed - and because cell protection settings are part of the format, we apply this first before protecting the sheet.

By default, all cells are unprotected and all formulae are visible (below)

With the desired cells selected, open the Cells Format dialog - Cell Protection tab - shown below. Select Protected to prevent changes to the contents or the format of a cell. Select Hide Formula to hide formulas.

With the correct protection settings having been applied to the selected cells, we must now protect the sheet or document. This is done as shown below…

A password is required - don’t forget it!!

This is the message that you get when attempting to modify the contents of a cell.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 22nd, 2005 at 9:18 pm and is filed under Using OpenOffice Calc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.