Calc cell and sheet protection with a pivot table

[FrogFan]

Hello all,

Apologies in advance for the long post.

I have built an elaborate calc document containing around 20 individual sheets to help my sister-in-law (SIL) manage meal-ordering and attendance taking for a women’s club. Managing these activities is surprisingly complicated.

My SIL is not computer-savvy, and I’m at pains to prevent her from editing critical components of the sheet by making liberal use of cell and sheet protection. So far, this approach has worked reasonably well. I’ve also employed hyperlinks on the individual sheets to facilitate her navigation among the sheets as she does her work without having to remember which tab to click and how to navigate among the tabs when they’re not all displayed on the screen.

In short, my SIL knows virtually nothing about LibreOffice Calc and has neither the time nor the inclination to learn it.

I’ve built a pivot table to track one aspect of the process and configured it to send the output of the table to a different sheet. In addition to the pivot table output, this sheet contains a cell with a hyperlink back to the “Table of contents” of the calc document.

I want to protect the cell containing the hyperlink so that my SIL can’t change it, but I want ensure that the pivot table continuously updates itself as underlying data has changed. I’ve found that if I protect the sheet, I can keep my SIL from messing up the hyperlink, but then the pivot table won’t update.

Is there a way keep my SIL from changing the cell containing the hyperlink witout preventing the pivot table from updating?

Thanks for any help.

[FrogFan]

Well, I went back and tried something I thought I had already tried, and it worked. Apologies for any interruptions.

I went back to the sheet in question and selected all of the columns in the pivot table, then navigated to Format>Cells and cleared the “Protected” selection. (LO won’t let you change individual elements of the pivot table anyway.)

Then I selected the cell containing the hyperlink and navigated to Format>Cells and selected “Protect”. After having done both of these things, I protected the sheet. The result is I can’t change the cell containing the hyperlink but the pivot table updates normally.

As I said, I thought I had done this and it failed. Evidently not.