Unprotect Sheet is greyed out in Excel for the web

It is greyed out on purpose

Open a protected workbook in Excel for the web, go to the Review tab, and the protection commands are dimmed. Clicking does nothing. There is no error, no tooltip explaining why, and no password prompt — which is what makes this so frustrating to search for.

The reason is simple and permanent: Excel for the web enforces sheet protection but cannot change it. The browser client honours the lock so your colleagues cannot edit protected cells, but the code paths for applying and removing protection were never implemented there. This is not a licensing limit, a bug, or something a different browser fixes. A Microsoft 365 subscription does not unlock it either, because the feature is absent rather than gated.

Confirming that is what you are looking at

Two quick tells, because “greyed out” has more than one cause:

• You are in the web app if the ribbon is inside a browser tab and there is an Open in Desktop App button near the top right, or an Editing / Viewing dropdown.
• In desktop Excel, a greyed‑out Review tab usually means something else — see the last section.

If you are in the web app, nothing you do inside that tab will remove the protection. The two routes below both involve leaving it.

Route 1 — open it in desktop Excel

The obvious answer, if you have Excel installed and you know the password:

1. Click Editing → Open in Desktop App (older layouts show Open in Excel on the ribbon).
2. The desktop app opens the same file from OneDrive or SharePoint, with the full ribbon.
3. Review → Unprotect Sheet, enter the password, and the change syncs back to the cloud copy.

This is the route Microsoft intends. It fails for two common reasons: you do not have desktop Excel, or you do not have the password.

Route 2 — download the file and unlock it in your browser

If desktop Excel is not an option, or the password is genuinely lost, the protection can be removed from the file itself. Sheet protection is a flag stored in the workbook, not a server‑side permission, so once you have the file you have everything you need.

1. In the web app, File → Save As → Download a Copy. You now have an .xlsx on your machine.
2. Drop it onto the unlock tool. It removes the protection flags in your browser tab — no upload, no account, nothing installed.
3. Open the unlocked copy, or upload it back to OneDrive or SharePoint to replace the original.

Worth being clear about the trade‑off: this produces a new file. It does not edit the cloud copy in place, so version history and sharing links still point at the original until you upload the replacement yourself. If several people are working in that workbook, tell them before you overwrite it.

And the one case this does not solve: if the workbook needs a password just to open, that is AES encryption rather than an edit lock, and it cannot be removed by any means short of the correct password.

Greyed out in desktop Excel means something different

Same symptom, different causes. In the desktop app, check for these:

• The file is in Protected View or opened read‑only — the whole ribbon is limited. Click Enable Editing first.
• The workbook is marked as Final — File → Info → Protect Workbook shows the state and lets you clear it.
• The workbook structure is protected, which dims a different set of commands. That is a separate lock with its own flag.
• You are in cell edit mode — press Esc, because a half‑typed formula dims most of the ribbon.

Unlock it in seconds instead

The manual route works, but our free in‑browser tool does the same thing in one drop — nothing is uploaded, everything runs on your device.

Frequently asked

Related guides

Unprotect an Excel sheet on a Mac · Excel password remover — free and online · How to remove a password from an Excel file