Cell locking/protection has always been a bit of a puzzling mystery to me.
I understand the general concept but putting it into practice has eluded me to this day.

If I understand correctly, once a cell has been locked/protected (I don't know the difference between the two)
a user can't change the contents of the cell.

I went through the steps to lock/protect a range (column) and near the end it asked for a password to 'unprotect' the range. I thought this rather odd, as I would expect a password request to lock/protect the range, not unprotect it!

Anyway, I complied, I gave it a password and it looked like the range was now protected.
I tested it, and got a pop-up when I tried to edit a cell in the range. This was to be expected.

As a bonus, all of my unprotected cells that had previously had the green marker in the upper left hand corner, now were rid of the marker.

Fast forward to just now...
I ran a routine to first copy cells in rangeA onto another worksheet.
Inside that range was my locked/protected range of cells in one column.

The second step of the routine (subject to change of course), was to clear the contents of the rangeA.
I was hoping that Excel would clear the cells of rangeA, but not touch the locked/protected range.
The cells were after all a locked/protected range, were they not?

Well guess what? The locked/protected range was cleared along with the other cells.

So finally my questions.

What must I do to genuinely lock/protect a range and also be able to clear a range that includes this locked area?

Will I be forced to alter the clearing to leave out the locked/protected part? That seems a little silly if the cells are supposed to be genuinely protected.

TIA!