Question

I am using the Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel library in VB.Net on an excel sheet that is protected. All of the protected settings are working fine except that I cannot set Select Locked Cells which shows when you are using the Excel protect sheet interface but I cannot see how to set this to false using the library. I have tried all of the different values in the protect method but none of them toggle the value.

Excel protected sheet menu

Below is the code snippet I am using to get my workSheet, populate some values, and then protect the sheet. GetWorkSheet is an internal method which will return a WorkSheet object, and invoiceData is a datatable which has the data which is being added to the spreadsheet.

Dim newSheet As Worksheet = getWorkSheet(newSheetName)

' Make the current Work Sheet active so that it will be accepting the data.
newSheet.Activate()
newSheet.Unprotect(sheetPassword)
For i As Integer = 1 To invoiceData.Rows(0).ItemArray.Count
    newSheet.Cells(transactionalRow, i) = invoiceData.Rows(0).ItemArray(i - 1)
Next
'work is done so protect it again
newSheet.Protect(sheetPassword, False, True, False, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True)
excel.ActiveWorkbook.Save()

Answer 1

It’s very confusing because that property is not set with the Protect statement.

After calling your protect statement, issue the following call:

ActiveSheet.EnableSelection = xlNoRestrictions

See this page for the other values for EnableSelection:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.office.tools.excel.worksheet.enableselection(VS.80).aspx