# Excel - Allowing formating on a protected sheet

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/excel-allowing-formating-on-a-protected-sheet/413009>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [July 24, 2007, 9:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/excel-allowing-formating-on-a-protected-sheet/413009 "2007-07-24T21:20:20Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Carol\_the\_Impaler](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/6a8cbe/32.png) [@Carol\_the\_Impaler](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Carol_the_Impaler)\
**Post date:** [July 24, 2007, 9:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/excel-allowing-formating-on-a-protected-sheet/413009/1 "2007-07-24T21:20:20Z")

</div>

What am I missing here? I’ve created an Excel workbook that needs to have some but not all of the cells protected. I specifically marked “Allow Users of this Worksheet to Format Columns”. However, one of my users is getting ##### in an unprotected cell and isn’t able to make the column wider because Excel tells her the worksheet is protected.

(Moreover, I formatted the columns to autofit selection and also made sure they were big enough for up to a six digit number. No matter the change, my user is saying they get the #'s in the column. On my end, of course, it looks fine.)

So, my questions are: did I do the protection thing wrong? Did I do the column formatting wrong? Is the column width problem tied to the worksheet being protected? How do I fix this problem? I absolutely must be able to protect certain cells in this workbook!