Phantom locked cells in Excel

Did you know it was Excel's 40th anniversary this year? Amazing! So what happens when you are working in a spreadsheet, and suddenly you notice a strange flicker on the page... and when you go to enter your next piece of data, the data won't enter into the cell?

I struck that problem earlier this year. I paused. I saved. I tried again. The data would still not enter.

I closed the spreadsheet. I reopened it. The data would still not enter.

I closed the spreadsheet. I shut down the PC. I restarted the PC, reopened the spreadsheet. The data would still not enter.

I noticed that, despite the fields where I was entering data being set to unlock, the locked cell icon on the toolbar looked like it was toggled on. But it shouldn't have been. I checked that the sheet was unprotected. It was. 

Sigh. I headed off to Microsoft Support and entered "Unlocked Excel cells locked even though sheet is unprotected" (here). I found a post where the title looked promising - You are unable to select unprotected cells in Excel - (Microsoft Support, 2020). But when I went to look at the page, it was basically telling me to manually unlock the cell.

Right. Perhaps I needed to assume that the cell, despite being unlocked, was actually locked, in order to fix it. 

So on the Home tab, I expanded the down arrow in the Fonts group, clicked the Protection tab, and then unticked the Protection tab. Click OK. And hoped it would all be good again.

It was :-)

Sam

References:

Microsoft Support. (2020, August 20). Unlocked Excel cells locked even though sheet is unprotected. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/you-are-unable-to-select-unprotected-cells-in-excel-0edc57a3-805c-40f9-f137-441a1ea405dc