locking color and/or border of a cell

[little_johnny]

Hello,

I wish to lock a fill/ background colour to a range of cells, and keep it locked in, regardless of the data I input, whether the cell is blank or not, and even if other cells are directly copy/pasted onto it.

The ranges are:

A1:C25 to be Red Fill
A26:C50 to be Green Fill
A51:C75 to be Red Fill
A76:C100 to be Green Fill

and so forth.

I also wish to lock a thick border around each range, that will not disappear if I paste other cells onto it.

My problem lies wherein I want to copy/paste data from other cells straight onto the range, or when I highlight in the cells and drag down for a quick pattern copy and so forth.

It's fine dragging from A1 to A25 and all cells are red, but I want to be able to drag past A25 and still retain the locked color, which for A26 would be green, if that makes sense?

Cheers!

PS: using Excel 2011 for Mac.

 

[little_johnny]

Nobody yet?

I thought this would've been easy!

 

[Jim Gordon]

Sorry, but I don’t think you can do exactly what you are asking for. You can lock cells and then protect the worksheet, choosing which aspects of protection you want to control as shown in the dialog on this page. Dragging cells down through an unprotected range allows you to choose whether to keep the original cell formatting or the destination cell formatting, but that applies to the entire range that’s copied.