Question

Is there a way to lock certain cells from being edited by the user? I have tried the following:

WritableCellFormat cf = new WritableCellFormat();
cf.setLocked(true);
sheet.addCell(new Number(col, row, value, cf));

However this doesn’t seem to have any effect on the resulting spreadsheet i.e. the cell contents can still be changed when the file is opened in Excel.

Answer 1

you have to “activate” protection for each sheet. I’m not shure how exactly this should be done. The method I found is

sheet.setProtected(true);

but obviously this method is no longer recommended. So You should probably try to find some newer one.

edit:
sorry, my mistake. This lock every cell in the sheet.

edit 2:
It works for me if you lock entiry sheet and then unlock editable cells.

sheet.getSettings().setProtected(true);
WritableCellFormat unlocked = new WritableCellFormat();
unlocked.setLocked(false);
Label l = new Label(0, 0, "", unlocked);
sheet.addCell(l);