How to hide your Excel formulas from prying eyes
Hiding formulas in an Excel spreadsheet is similar to protecting your Excel sheets with a password, or being selective about which cells, rows, or columns you protect, but with a twist, you’re not hiding the cells, just the formulas. Once you know how to do it, it’s really easy and a feature I know you’ll use over and over again.
The first thing to do is to unlock all the cells that you really want to hide. Seems ironic, but you need to do this in Excel to then allow cells to hide. By default, all cells in an Excel worksheet are locked in the first instance. So to unlock your cells-
1. Select all your worksheets
2. Home tab
3. Format option in cell group
4. Click on the Lock Cell option at the second bottom of the list of options
The lock cells actually work like an on/off button and as you can see they are initially locked by default. You will need to unlock them in the first instance in order to use this method. If you are not sure whether they are locked or not, you should go directly to the bottom list and select format cells from the menu and click the protection tab where you can see whether the locked box is checked or not. The mark is locked and a mark is not locked. That easy!
Well done, you have successfully completed Stage 1 of this process.
Let’s move on to Stage 2.
1. Highlight the cells that contain the formulas you want to hide.
2. Home tab
3. Format option in cell group
4. Protection of eyelashes
5.Check the Hidden option
6. Click OK.
At this point, you will still see your formulas, as there is one last stage for this: protecting the worksheet.
Let’s move on to Stage 3.
1. Home tab
2. Cell Group Format Option
3. Scroll down to protection
4. Protection sheet
5. Enter a password
6. Press OK
7. Re-enter your password when prompted
Your formulas should now be hidden from prying eyes. Well done, all that hard work he put into his formulas is now protected.
You’re still the Excel guru of your office once again! Go ahead and give it a try, you’ll be using it regularly; i did when i discovered this top excel tip.