How to protect cell formatting only?

I can’t figure it out. I have two different background colors changed via two different cell formats on a sheet I’m constantly editing, yet when I use the bottom right box to drag, or copy and paste, that format gets replaced.

If I “protect sheet”, I have to deal with passwords which I don’t want to deal with, and seems I’m also protecting more than I want.

What am I missing?

You can leave the password blank.
For a perfect separation of data, processing, layout and formatting you need a database rather than a spreadsheet which an arithmetic calculator in the first place.

Thanks, but even leaving password blank then prevents me from changing the values in the cell.

I can’t believe nobody else has asked about this in the last two decades, and I refuse to believe you need a database for it.

All I’m asking is for simple, clear checkboxes for the protection of “cell content” and “cell formatting” separately.

Use Cell Styles instead of the manual (direct) formatting method. Then you will able to restore the cell properties in a simple way - when you modified them accidentally.

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Paste Special offers Number or Formula on the right click menu. Clicking either of them won’t change the format of the receiving cell. They can be made into a keyboard shortcut in Tools > Customise > Keyboard

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I’m not down with the libreoffice lingo. I know I wrote formats, I meant styles.

Enough people have harassed me about this so this time I thought, ok I’ll use styles… and turns out, that did not help after all.

  • Paste-special data (and/or formulas) and your formatting won’t be touched.
  • Using styles, you can fix formatting problems easily:
    – Remove all hard formatting preserving the style attributes (Ctrl+M).
    – Restore all style attributes with a simple double-click in the stylist.
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The fill handle.
Anyway, I don’t find/remember a way to fill down (Ctrl+D, drag the fill handle) that don’t touch/replace the formatting.
As a workaround, you can fill down, copy, undo, and paste as unformatted text (Ctrl+Shift+Alt+V, Enter).