Question

I have a shared spreadsheet that can be edited by anyone who’s got the link. Now I’d like to setup a protected range that can only edited by me, the owner.

Unfortunatly this is not working for me. I can not edit the permissions for the range in question, it just displays a Box similar to:

    Visibility Options

    Save       Cancel

Ist this expected behavior? A bug? Not implemented yet?

tx for info

Answer 1

I figured out how to protect certain cell and allow anyone to edit other cells. It a workaround for now until Google improves this feature.

• Go to Format -> Named and Protected Cells
• Create separate Regions for the data you want to protect and for the data you want to be edited.
• Remove any existing protections
• Share the spreadsheet so that it is read-only for everyone
• Go back to Named and Protected Cells and create sharing for the
  regions you want to be protected
• When creating the protection, “everyone” should be listed as Read Only (you can’t modify this, it’s inherited from the current global sharing of the spreadsheet.)
• Do not create any protection for the regions you want everyone to be
  able to edit
• Exit out of the spreadsheet and then go back in (not sure if this step is
  required, but this is what I did)
• Now re-share the spreadsheet so that “everyone” can edit
• Sign-out of your Google account and open the public link to the
  spreadsheet. After the spreadsheet loads, the protected regions
  should be read-only (grey hash lines across them) and the input
  regions should be editable by everyone

This finally worked for me. Hope it works for everyone else.