Can you password protect a Google Sheet?

Google Sheets has no setting that asks for a password before a file opens. Its help page on protecting sheets says you can’t “protect data with a password.” Who can open a file is set by its sharing settings, and protecting a sheet or a range only decides who can edit it.

What to use instead of a password, and its limits

If General access is “Anyone with the link” instead of “Restricted,” the file opens for whoever has the link, with no Google sign-in.

Protecting and hiding don’t reduce who can see the data. Google’s help page says plainly of protection: “This shouldn’t be used as a security measure.” It adds that a protected spreadsheet can still be printed, copied and exported. For hiding, it says: “Spreadsheet viewers can still access content in hidden sheets.” So hiding or protecting a password column leaves the passwords readable by everyone who can open the file.

Hiding part of a sheet means splitting the file

Sharing settings apply to the whole file. The Google help pages cited here describe no setting that shows a tab or a column to some viewers and not others. So if some people shouldn’t see part of a sheet, move that part into its own file and share that file with fewer people.

What to fix first when your passwords live in a spreadsheet walks through narrowing who can open a file, step by step. Two more settings aren’t covered there.

• On eligible work or school accounts, you can give a person’s access an expiration date. This suits someone who helps for a fixed period.
• A Google Workspace admin can turn off sharing outside the organization, or allow it only with “Allowlisted Domains” (the part of an email address after the @). This takes the Drive & Docs administrator privilege.

How an Excel password compares

Microsoft Excel can put a password on a file. Microsoft’s steps are File, then Info, then Protect Workbook, then Encrypt with Password. Encrypting scrambles the file so it can’t be read without the password, so people who don’t know the password can’t open it.

Everyone who uses the file still has to be told that password. Microsoft’s help page warns that “You still run the risk of passwords falling into the hands of unintended users.” If the password is forgotten, Microsoft can’t recover it.

So moving a sheet of logins to Excel doesn’t change who can read the passwords inside. Everyone who uses the file knows both the file’s password and the passwords in it. Each time someone leaves, you change the file’s password and every password they saw, then send them out again. If you send them by chat, those messages stay too (How to stop sending passwords over Slack, Teams and email).

What a sheet of logins still leaves

The settings above shrink the number of people who can open the file and the ways to copy it. They can’t make someone forget a password they read or delete a copy they kept. So with a sheet of usernames and passwords, decide first whether the passwords should stay in it at all.

There are two broad ways to take them out. One shares the password with people. A password manager is the common example: people see it, or let the manager fill it in. The other keeps the password from people. Only admins hold it, and a tool fills it in when someone signs in. Managing shared accounts compares the options, and the spreadsheet article above sets out the order for moving passwords out.

After the passwords are out, the sheet can stay as a list of which account on which service each person uses. With no passwords in it, nobody who opens it can use it to sign in.