# Read Only problem in Excel



## cwilmot (Apr 21, 2001)

I have been making daily additions to an Excel worksheet. Suddenly it adopted a "read only" status and I can no longer make entries into same. When I move the cursor around all it will do is highlight. How can I restore this chart to normalcy?


----------



## Zack Barresse (Jul 25, 2004)

Close the Excel file, view it in its folder, right click it and select Properties, un-check Read Only. Also, if the workbook is already open by another user you will get the warning upon opening the file that it is in use by another person and give you the option of opening as read only.

The only other thing I can think of is that you are opening this from a CD/DVD drive, whereas you cannot save to; you must *burn* to these drives and cannot exchange data traditionally as you would on a hard [disc] drive.

HTH


----------



## mkannegu (Apr 11, 2008)

Hi,
You said that if we set the file permissions to read only by right clicking on the excel file and changing the properties -Read Only = True.
But, any body how has access to that folder on server can change the property back to Read only = false and corrupt the excel file.
How to address such problem?
Regards,
Mahesh


----------



## jimr381 (Jul 20, 2007)

Welcome to the forum. 

You will have to talk to your network administrator if you want to mark the file/folder as read-only for certain users. You might have rights, but I doubt it. I can't tell you for sure if you can lock the file down individually through the rights and permissions since I do not know your network drive's file system format.


----------

