If you wish to protect the cells on a worksheet that contain formulas you will need to lock the cells first, whilst also ensuring that the cells users should be able to change are unlocked.

It may have been a while since you worked on this worksheet and you are not sure which cells are locked and which are not. You need a fast method of locating the locked cells. Let’s use Conditional Formatting to highlight the cells that are already locked so they are easy to identify.

The CELL function in Excel is very powerful and relatively unknown to many. Use the Excel CELL function to return information about a cell. This can include the cell’s number format, row number or whether it is locked or protected.

There are times when this kind of functionality becomes extremely useful. Especially while Excel does not provide many other means of finding the number format of a cell, or whether it has been locked.

An interesting question came up during one of my consultancy visits last week. They needed to find the top 5 values in a list based on multiple criteria. They then also needed the name of the company achieving that value.