The core problem here isn't a technical limitation of Excel 2016; it's a fundamental tension between control and collaboration that legacy tools were never designed to resolve. You need to protect your delivery tracker from accidental damage by novice users, yet you also need those same users to add rows freely. That you have to choose between data integrity and team productivity is not a reflection of your skill as a builder, it is a reflection of the tool's outdated architecture. You are asking a spreadsheet designed for a single author to behave like a living database, and it is failing you.
In practical terms, what you are experiencing is the exact friction that drives people away from shared workbooks. Excel's sheet protection was built to lock things down, not to enable safe expansion. Allowing row insertion in the settings *should* work, but the feature is brittle because the underlying model treats every cell as a fixed coordinate, not a dynamic record. The result is a frustrating paradox: the more you protect your sheet, the less useful it becomes for the people who need to use it. You are not doing anything wrong. The tool is simply not built for the problem you are solving.
This is where the conversation needs to shift. Instead of asking how to trick Excel 2016 into doing something it was never designed for, it is worth exploring a different approach altogether. An AI-native spreadsheet does not treat data as a static grid. It understands that rows are records, that a delivery log is a living list, and that protection should apply to the *structure* of the data, not the ability to add to it. In a modern tool, you could set permissions that let anyone append a new delivery while blocking them from editing existing entries or deleting columns. The protection becomes invisible because it works *with* the user's intent, not against it.
The real takeaway is this: you are not asking for too much. You are asking for the wrong tool. Your team needs to add deliveries without breaking the sheet; that is a basic requirement, not a luxury. The solution is not to find a buried checkbox in a 2016 menu. It is to adopt a platform where adding a row is as natural as typing a name, and where protection is built into the logic of the data itself, not bolted on after the fact. Stop fighting the grid. Start exploring a smarter foundation.