NewDeal Hot Tip 1001

[Hot Tips for...] NewCalc

NewCalc Cell Protection

There is no provision for cell protection specifically, but there is a way to make it difficult to select a cell.

Draw a small rectangle over the cell you want to protect and make the line and area attributes unfilled, so it is an invisible box on top of the cell. It's hard to get past the graphic if you don't know it is there, because to select the rectangle, you have to click on its invisible edge. The cell will not be protected from calculations, but it will be difficult to access with the mouse. You can see the cell, you just cannot select it to edit it.

To make a visible tab for the cell protector graphic, make a grouped object: an invisible rectangle with a visible "tab" on one end.

You might store the graphic in a Scrapbook file, so you can copy and paste into spreadsheets when you need it. You can make it an unselectable annotation, which requires a couple steps to unprotect it for editing. You could also leave the outline visible as thin black or red line so you can tell which cells are protected.


NewCalc Text Overflow

If your text in a cell doesn't spill over or overflow into the cells to its right, select the cells and press the DELETE key. Seemingly empty cells might actually contain formatting that interferes with overflow text.
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Last Modified 27 Feb 1999