How to hide and lock formulas in Excel

How to hide and lock formulas in Excel
by Svetlana Cheusheva, updated on November 9, 2022
This tutorial shows how to hide formulas in Excel so they do not show up in the formula bar. Also, you will learn how to quickly lock a selected formula or all formulas in a worksheet to protect them from being deleted or overwritten by other users.
Microsoft Excel does its best to make formulas easy to interpret. When you select a cell containing a formula, the formula displays in the Excel formula bar. If that's not enough, you can evaluate each part of the formula individually by going to the Formulas tab > Formula Auditing group and clicking the Evaluate Formulas button for a step-by-step walkthrough.
But what if you don't want your formulas to be shown in the formula bar, nor anywhere else in the worksheet, for confidentiality, security, or other reasons? Moreover, you may want to protect your Excel formulas to prevent other users from deleting or overwriting them. For example, when sending some reports outside your organization, you may want the recipients to see the final values, but you don't want them to know how those values are calculated, let along making any changes to your formulas.
Luckily, Microsoft Excel makes it fairly simple to hide and lock all or selected formulas in a worksheet, and further on in this tutorial we will show the detailed steps.

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  How to lock formulas in Excel
  
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  How to hide formulas in Excel
  
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  How to unprotect and unhide formulas
  

How to lock formulas in Excel
If you've put a lot of effort in creating an awesome worksheet that you need to share with other people, you certainly wouldn't want anyone to mess up any smart formulas that you worked so hard on! The most common way of preventing people from tampering with your Excel formulas is to protect the worksheet. However, this does not just lock formulas, but rather locks all cells on the sheet and stops users from editing any of the existing cells and entering any new data. Sometimes you may not want to go that far.
The following steps demonstrate how you can only lock a selected formula(s) or all cells with formulas on a given sheet, and leave other cells unlocked.
1. Unlock all cells in the worksheet.
For starters, unlock all of the cells on your worksheet. I realize that it may sound confusing because you have not locked any cells yet. However, by default, the Locked option is turned on for all cells on any Excel worksheet, whether an existing or a new one. This does not mean that you cannot edit those cells, because locking cells has no effect until you protect the worksheet.
So, if you want to