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How to prevent specific cell contents from being deleted in Excel?

Author Siluvia Last modified

This article is talking about preventing specific cell contents from being deleted in Excel. You can achieve it with the methods in this article.

Prevent specific cell contents from being deleted by protecting the worksheet
Prevent specific cell contents from being deleted by using VBA code

Prevent specific cell contents from being deleted by protecting the worksheet

By default, all cells in worksheet are locked. If you want to prevent specific cell contents from being deleted, and make other cells editable after protecting, please do as follows.

1. Click the select button button on the top left corner of worksheet to select the whole worksheet. Then press Ctrl + 1 keys to open the Format Cells dialog box.

2. In the popping up Format Cells dialog box, uncheck the Locked option under the Protection tab, and then click the OK button. See screenshot:

uncheck the Locked option under the Protection tab

3. Select the cells you don’t want the contents to be deleted, press Ctrl + 1 keys to open the Format Cells dialog box again, check the Locked option under the Protection tab, and then click the OK button.

check the Locked option under the Protection tab

4. Now click Review > Protect Sheet, then specify and confirm your password in both the Protect Sheet and Confirm Password dialog boxes.

specify and confirm the password

Now the worksheet is protected. And the specified cell contents won’t be deleted any more.

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Prevent specific cell contents from being deleted by using VBA code

Besides the above two methods, you can run VBA code to prevent specific cell contents from being deleted in a worksheet. Please do as follows.

1. Open the worksheet which contains the cell contents you don’t want to be deleted, right click the Sheet Tab, and then click View Code from the right-clicking menu.

2. Copy and paste the below VBA code into the Code window of the Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications window.

VBA code: Prevent specific cell contents from being deleted in Excel

Private Sub Worksheet_Change(ByVal Target As Range)
    If Intersect(Target, Range("A1:E7")) Is Nothing Then Exit Sub
    On Error GoTo ExitPoint
    Application.EnableEvents = False
    If Not IsDate(Target(1)) Then
        Application.Undo
        MsgBox " You can't delete cell contents from this range " _
        , vbCritical, "Kutools for Excel"
    End If
ExitPoint:
    Application.EnableEvents = True
End Sub

Note: In the code, A1:E17 is the range which the cell contents you will prevent from being deleted. You can change the range based on your needs.

From now on, when you trying to delete cell contents from range A1:E17, you will get a Kutools for Excel dialog box as below screenshot shown, please click the OK button.

when deleting cell contents from the specific range, a warning message will pop out

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