I'm writing an import task in SQL Server that grabs data from an excel spread sheet created by one of my users (Access 2003).

SQL Server is quite picky about formatting, column names, and sheet name and since my users were having problems not changing these elements of the work sheet I created a password protected sheet that locks the column headers and formatting.

on the list of unprotected elements only the first two boxes are ticked.

When the user types things in manually this works fine. however if they copy data from another excel file that has custom formatting on the cells and paste it into my protected sheet it ignores the protection and changes the formatting for those cells!

This can't possible be the designed functionality of a protected sheet, is there any way to force the sheet to retain it's formatting and ignore the formatting of pasted content?