Protect form – embeddin Excel spreadsheet (2003)

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One of our users has a form she created with form fields. She wants to embed part of an Excel spreadsheet in the form. There are 2 problems I need help with. 1) How to lock the embedded spreadsheet so no one can use the mouse and scroll anywhere other than the area we have selected. (2) How to include the unlocked cells in the spreadsheet in the Word document so that when we protect the form in Word, we can still get to the Excel spreadsheet and enter data in the unprotected cells. Is this possible? She doesn’t want to use a word table because she said she has some complex formula in the spreadsheet that Word won’t recognize.

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1) The worksheet can be protected in Excel in the usual way. This is a two-step process:
a) Unlock the appropriate cells.
– Select the cells that the user will be allowed to edit.
– Select Format | Cells…
– Activate the Protection tab.
– Clear the Locked check box.
– Click OK.
Protect the worksheet.
– Select Tools | Protection | Protect Sheet…
– Tick and clear check boxes to specify what the user will be allowed to do.
– Click OK.

2) The worksheet object should be in an unprotected section of the document.
– If necessary, insert continuous section breaks before and after the Excel object.
– Activate the Protect Document task pane.
– Specify that Filling In Forms is allowed.
– Click Sections… and make sure that the section containing the Excel object will be unprotected.
– Click Start Enforcing Protection.
Note: since the worksheet object is in an unprotected section, the user can delete the entire object.

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Thanks. That works great. Do you have any suggestions how we can keep the user from scrolling to other cells in Excel? Can we lock it somehow so all they can get to is the range we picked to embed into Word?

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You can set the column width and the row height to 0 for all columns and rows outside the area you want to make available.

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