Protecting data in Google Sheets
If you don’t want people to change the content of spreadsheet, you can protect it.
Having lots of formulas and queries in a GSheet always kept me skeptical about sharing it with lots of people until recently I learned about Protected Sheet and Range feature. (Before this I always used to create a copy of sheet and keep it to myself, just in case!)
The feature can be accessed in three ways:
- Data tab in top ribbon (see image below)
- Right click anywhere on the sheet name
- Right click on a cell
TaaDaa! Give your protection a name and you could mimic it later. Also, some cells (need not be continuous) could be made exception from this protection. Which means, one can go and edit them freely.
After defining the range that you want to protect, one can either decide to show a warning when those cell/sheets are being manipulated or simply restricted from being edited.(I am so happy that now only me and my teammate could make changes and the dashboards are no more breaking!)
Just-in-case your cell was not protected and something looks fishy, go ahead an right click and vola — cell history! You know who is the culprit now.
Hope this information is helpful.