Excel: Unprotect data - how to do it

Excel offers its users various functions to manage and analyze the data it contains. To protect your data from deletion or modification, you can set up write protection for it. How to unprotect your data is explained in our article.

This is what write-protection in Excel is for

If you have shared your Excel spreadsheet with other users as well, it may make sense to set up write-protection for them. This way you prevent other people from making changes to your data or deleting it by mistake. To activate write protection for a workbook, first select it. Then, in Excel, navigate to the "File" tab, select "Information" from the menu bar on the left, and click "Protect Workbook." If desired, you can additionally protect the workbook with a password at this point.

How to unprotect a workbook in Excel

Once you have activated write protection for a workbook, it remains active until you or another user with write permission unprotects it.

1. To unprotect a workbook, first open the protected Excel file and then switch to the "Review" tab.
2. Then click in the "Protect" area on the option "Unprotect sheet" and enter, if you have set up the function, the password of the file.
3. Once you confirm the deactivation of the sheet protection with "OK", it is removed and editing the table is possible for everyone.