Securing a dashboard for company-wide distribution shouldn't mean sacrificing basic functionality, yet that's exactly the trade-off this user is facing. The problem is straightforward: protect a sheet to prevent editing, and the scroll bar stops working. Unprotect it, and the data is vulnerable. This isn't a failure of effort, it's a failure of the tool itself.
The user, new to Excel, has done the right things. They've hidden the other sheets, locked the workbook, and attempted sheet protection. Each step makes sense individually. But together they create a dead end: the scroll bar triggers the same protection prompt because it's tied to a control that requires edit permission to move. The result is a dashboard that feels locked down in all the wrong ways, secure, yes, but also frustrating to navigate. For someone building a tool meant to serve an entire company staff, that friction undermines the entire purpose of the dashboard.
What this reveals is a deeper limitation of traditional spreadsheets when pushed beyond their original design. They were built for individual analysts, not for distributing interactive, read-only dashboards to hundreds of people. Workarounds exist, converting to PDF, using Power BI, or building a separate front-end, but each adds complexity and distance from the original source of truth. The user shouldn't have to abandon their spreadsheet to get the experience they need. They should be able to protect their data and keep the scroll bar alive, without compromise.
Our view is clear: the solution shouldn't require the user to choose between security and usability. If a tool claims to support company-wide dashboards, it should handle both. This user's question is really a feature request in disguise, for an environment where permissions are smart enough to lock cells but leave navigation controls untouched. Until that's native, the practical path forward is to use a separate viewer layer, like a published web dashboard or a read-only app built from the same data. That way, the spreadsheet stays as the source of truth, and the staff gets the scroll bar they need.