How to Protect Excel Sheet with Password | Lock Excel Sheet

hi everyone my name is kevin today i want to show you how you could password protect an excel spreadsheet why would you want to do that well maybe you have a spreadsheet that has sensitive information maybe you have financial data and you don't want other people to access it put a password on it and that'll prevent other people from entering unless they know the password uh and as full disclosure before we jump into this i work at microsoft as a full-time employee all right enough talk let's jump into it here i am on my pc and i have the latest version of excel that comes with office uh 365. if you have a recent version like 2019 2016 2013 or any version before the password production uh protection capability has been there for a while so you should be able to do this but i can't guarantee anything because i'm just on the latest version all right well let's open up excel and oh i have important financial data in this sheet this is an income statement of revenue my youtube revenue actually that's just made up i'm dreaming there and there i could see how much i make every single year i really don't make that much but hey you can dream right and here you can see all my different expenses for whatever reason those expenses always seem to creep up and so here you can see my total expenses and then i have my income loss before taxes this is probably not stuff that i just want to have easily available that anyone can see so i should probably password protect it so how do we do that what i'm going to do is we click on the file menu and then by default i land in this section called info the good news is we want to be in info because you'll see this option right next to the info button that says protect workbook let's click on protect workbook and one of the options is encrypt with password that's exactly what we want to do so let's click on that and i get this little dialog that lets me type in a password and now a few things to remember they have this caution text here and it's good that they include it because basically if you forget your password you're never going to get back into this document because there's no forget password hint or anything like that in fact what they recommend doing is write down the password write down the file name and store that in a safe place don't just store that on your desk where anyone can see it that actually happens a lot so what we're going to do is we're going to type in a super complicated password i'm going to type in password and i'm just kidding do not use that as a password um it actually turns out when you look at the most popular passwords they've done analysis on this password is actually one of the most popular passwords and if you are using that as your password you should change it right away because that's a very poor password that's probably the first password that most people guess when they try to break into an account um so i had to have me re-enter the password because if i typed it wrong i would never be able to get into this sheet again so i'm going to click on ok and now it says a password is required to open this notebook so what i'm going to do is we're going to close excel and i'm going to we'll go ahead and save the sheet and then i'm going to open excel again and we'll test it out so here you'll see on my recent list my password protect excel sheet is the first item and here before i can open the excel spreadsheet it says that it's protected and i have to type in a password so we're going to type in my super complicated password that no one can possibly guess and we're going to click on ok and so the password checks out and so here it opens my data and i can see all my important financial data so pretty easy to set a password on your sheet and so why would you do this well let's say that you like storing your documents in the cloud i personally have all my documents in one drive because i don't trust my computer maybe my hard drive dies but when i'm putting sensitive let's say financial information or other sensitive information in the cloud there's always that nagging worry that maybe my account will get hacked and so how do i protect against that well this is one additional layer of security where i can protect individual files that contain sensitive information using the password protection so kind of a nice thing to apply to your sheet it'll help you sleep a little easier at night if you use something like this um so anyway if you were able to protect more of your data using this technique please give this video a thumbs up if you want to see more videos like this you know what to do just hit that subscribe button and if there's anything else you want to learn about any other things that you're trying to figure out leave a comment down below and i'll add it to my list of videos to create in the future and hey that's all i have for you today i'll see you next time bye

Channel: Kevin Stratvert

Views: 400,633

Keywords: password, protect, excel, microsoft, office, office 365, 365, 360, microsoft excel, spreadsheet, workbook, sheet, cells, cell, spread sheet, worksheet, work sheet, excel 2019, excel 365, excel 2017, excel 2013, excel 2010, excel 2007, tutorial, how to, secure, info, file, home, save, open

Id: ReKRdROw26E

Length: 4min 13sec (253 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 01 2019