Secure Your Sheets by BetterSheets.co

<div> Hello I'm Andrew Kamphey. I'm the creator of Better Sheets. Thanks so much for watching this free tutorial. You may recognize this from another free tutorial, which I talked about summary tab, and I shared with you the minimum and maximum formula . And also I shared with you index , match and filter formulas in this Video is less tactical and more strategic. I am sharing with you some tactics on how to keep your sheets secure, but it generally is, generally speaking, I'm gonna be speaking with you about what to do and what not to do when creating sheets.

Sharing sheets and, and some features you may or may not know about, but like giving you some creative use cases of those. So when.  when securing data , one of the.  principles of data is garbage in and garbage out. If you get garbage data , you're gonna get garbage and analysis . If you are crowdsourcing your information or if you are allowing, say other people to edit your sheets there are some good practices and some bad practices. I'm gonna share with you a lot of the good stuff to do and really only. Thing to avoid. So stick around for the end.

I literally tell you the one thing never to do in any sheet whatsoever. I've had experience with it and I'll tell you what my experience with the one thing you should never do. But what you should be doing is using Google Forms as much as possible if you are getting information from other people. And they're going into a sheet and filling out that information you have almost no way to verify that data .

And it, it takes actually a lot of, a lot of legwork and, and formula work to validate to do data validation inside of Google Sheets, whereas Google Forms has a great amount of tools to do that for you. One thing that I found interesting is if you share . . And this is a fun, actually, a fun way to gi give people access to a sheet, but allow them to enter data in a different way. So what it is, is, is allowing them to be a commenter .

So if you go to advance, you can see you can chain sorry, you can can comment , so you can edit, can comment , and. You probably have only used edit and view and probably given people more edit access than they need. But if you say, you know, you ask someone, Hey, take a look at this sheet and, and suggest some changes. Don't give them edit access , just give them comment access .

You can also prevent editors and, or you can also for commenters and viewers, you can click this disabled options to download, print and copy, and that makes it very. Simple to keep your information from going other places, but also just what I've found is people will not, it won't be out of negligence. It'll just be out of like, oh, I want to help. So they'll download the data , they'll put it into their own sheet, mess with it, and then tell you, here's all the changes. But like, you don't have any version history .

You don't have any like way to really see what their changes are like. , if you just give them comment access , they can literally comment and you can have a documented process of here's what your comments were and here's what I did to resolve those. Really interesting. I, I like this a lot to, and also it's a good way if you are getting, say, reviews of something, or not necessarily just adding rows, but getting more information about a certain subject. Use comments and then change those comments into yourself, into columns.

And that's a good way to keep, make sure that the data you're getting is secure. And, and comments are a great way to in a creative way to get interaction from stakeholders. You can secure from comments , but also, here's something interesting. So many times you will.

Share an entire sheet and there'll be many tabs And say I'm working sometimes with an executive who I work with them on the summary tab and sometimes they're very good with Google sheets and they really do wanna like help with like percentages or sums and stuff, but I don't want them dealing with the data or I don't want them doing anything to the work that I did. Out of either negligence or they really want to change it. Like maybe they just didn't realize they could change something and they accidentally did.

So what you can do on the down arrow of a tab, you can go click that and use protect sheet. And in this you can go down to a range and say, Hey, don't touch any of this like a through. but you can change these columns or you can say the entire sheet and set those permissions of anyone or only you, right? Or show a warning . Or you can even restrict it to anyone. Only you, no one else can use it. And that's a really interesting thing to do. And this.  Lock icon shows up. You can see it. I have it there. I can always delete it here. Delete range or sheet protection .

And only I can do that now that I've set that permission. And you can do that on every sheet that you don't want anyone to mess with. You like, even if they don't do it out of like spite, they might do it out accidentally. They might be wanting to move. Table sheets and they, or they want to hide it. Hide is right next to protect . So, you know, if they want to hide there's delete or they might want to duplicate , but they accidentally hit delete, you know, or copy too. Like there's so many things they can do here that it's easier to. just protect yourself.

Cuz it literally doesn't take very much time. Right? I just did that in about 30 seconds each one or less than 30 seconds each one. And the last thing I will tell you is if something happens there is a great way to see all the changes. So if you state some changes you can click here at all changes and all of the changes, and there's some version histories. this is a really cool thing. You can create your own, say, backup system by renaming these or, or rather naming them and then looking back and saying, only show the name diversion.

So what's good about this is the, it also shows you the editors of each one. So if somebody says, I never touch, I was just in here looking around. I didn't edit anything. You can go in here and look. Did they edit it? And see lemme just wait. So the last thing I will tell you is what not to do. One of the simple, lazy things to get in the habit of is if you want to do some kind of work on a summary page and you're like, oh, I need to just do, you know, some. I don't know this times this, this is not a thing. And you have a number , but that, that's not the number you wanna show.

You wanna show another number , but you have to do it in a cell. What is very typical to do, and it's a very lazy thing to do, is to hide a column. So I just hit control and click there, or right click control, or right click here, and a high column. Now never high columns. And here is why.  If you hide tabs, let me hide this tab. There is always the way. Without un hiding the tab, you can go here, see all sheets, and see that that tab exists. There is literally no way to understand what is hidden here.

All I can see is that there's c e and then these two arrows and there's something hidden . you cannot make a comment next to it because that comment will, people will think that the comment is for this cell, not for the, this underneath. You're just, if you hide something and then write a note , like note here, like you're just dirty. You're just like messing up the aesthetic of here. So, .

What happens in reality is that if you hide something, literally every single person who ever sees that will ask what is hidden and unhide it and then hide it again. Be like, oh, I don't need to see that. You can even be like, keep this hidden , and everyone will unhide it and everyone will hide it again, and it's just unnecessary work. So what I suggest you do and how you never. Have that problem is do all of your work on a tab called work, right? So make any math that you need done. Do it on another tab. You can even show that work and say, here's where I did the work.

But this summary is really just for someone to read, right? Don't make it an interactive thing. A summary tab is truly for reading and understanding a summary and just seeing the analysis and not actually interacting with it. That is something I probably should have said in the other video. Who knows. Thank you for watching all of these videos. Thank you for never hiding any columns. I am going to see you on the other side of the paywall because if you don't wanna pay what you should do is you should email me. Right now you can email me here. I'll put it in right here.

I'll show it to you, andrew campy approved.com. Email me, tell me why you're not gonna pay. I am more than happy to answer any questions. You have a val Google Sheets. If you have just like a quick question you want answered I can put it in a video for you. I can help you out with some issue or problem or share , share with you some creative tactics around. Email me, andrew kafi.com. Kafi approve.com. Thanks so much for watching, and enjoy and go and make your sheets.</div>