Can you protect the formula only within EXCEL 2002? The idea is to be able to change the data over and over within any given cell but not allow anyone to change its formula.

Thank Youwhat OS?XP Pro Ver 2002 Service Pak 2I think I KNOW what you want to do. I assume you have formulas in some cells, data to change in others that access those cells. But maybe you're needing SOMETHING more complicated!

You should be able to do what I think you want by a fairly standard Excel process -- First, select any cells that have data in them to be *changed* and tell Excel to unlock them (Format cells --> protection. Unclick the "locked" box). Note that all cells are protected (locked) by default.

The trick is that Excel IGNORES the locked status until you protect the entire worksheet. Go to "tools" then "protection" and tell Excel to protect the entire sheet. You can enter a password if you want to really stop people from changing anything, but normally I don't -- my purpose is to prevent accidental changes, and you don't need to bother with a password for that.

Once the sheet is protected, only the cells you unlocked should be changable. The rest will give a pop-up error message.

Is this what you wanted to do? If you wanted to change data within a formula, while leaving the formula, I don't know how to do that -- but most people would put the data in different cells and have the formula just read them. In that case, my method should work.

Let me know how you MAKE out!

Ed