Short question: I need to share a worksheet with many people. some cells & columns must be protected/locked, but users must be able to sort by rows. I have tried every variation of Protect Sheet/Allow users to..., and I've attempted to do Review/Allow Users to Edit Ranges but I can't figure out how to input "let EVERYONE edit ranges without passwords", though I in fact only want them to be able to sort things (I still don't want them messing with the locked cells).

Is this really not possible? That seems unbelievable. Thanks for any help, this is driving me crazy.

Keith

Here's the longer story...

Holy Cow. I am incredibly frustrated. I've been working on a spreadsheet for somewhat general distribution. It's not particularly high-security information. But it has to make many round trips between me and the users, so it would be nice if they could only mess up the parts they are supposed to mess up.

I spent a LONG time building a macro-driven system that used custom views (to control visible columns) and Advanced Filters (to control visible rows), as well as some other clever odds and ends.

I eventually realized that as soon as I start protecting worksheets, macros get really dicey -- they raise security flags, some people may have them completely blocked, they break without notice, etc. etc... I can't really afford to require "support" of this spreadsheet, it just needs to work.

So I decided to maybe leave the macros in, but build in a non-macro approach that gives users most of the functionality. However, as far as I can tell, if I protect a worksheet, I can not sort it with Advanced Filter in Macros, or with Filtering outside of macros. That is, I can't sort or filter it. Period. Again, this is after I've allowed sorting & filtering when protecting. I think the answer may have to do with Review/Allow Users to Edit Ranges, but I can't get that to work...