Thanks for your effort—it’s good to see some progress in this direction. However, this feels like a missed opportunity to address a long-standing community need.
You’ve seen various requests from the community for granular locking: by column, by row, by user groups, etc. I believe this is a classic case where end users clearly understand their desired outcomes but struggle to generalize them into a universal implementation.
My thesis is simple: 99% of what users need from table-level locking has been right in front of us all along. We just need… conditional cell locking.
Yes, you could literally copy/paste the UI we know and love from Conditional Formatting and have it lock cells from editing when the formula evaluates to true. Hec, you might not even need new UI—just make “locked for editing” a new format that can be applied through conditional formatting, just like “italic” and “bold” (if you’re feeling particularly DRY).
Consider the advantages:
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Conditional formatting applies cell by cell
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Allows application to multiple columns or entire tables
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Supports formulas
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Works at the view level, enabling different locking rules per view
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Can inherit from the source table or be redefined for specific views, depending on business needs
I’m confident that conditional locking could solve virtually any use case the community has raised. Happy to demonstrate how it would work for any specific scenarios people can think of.
An alternative I’ve advocated for years is to Make “Disable If” available to all columns, not just buttons. While this would achieve similar outcomes, conditional locking (or locking as a conditional format) might be an even more intuitive and powerful solution as it can be applied to multiple columns or an entire table at once.
Here’s hoping this finds receptive ears. We don’t need more setting toggles—let’s leverage the existing powerful formula system that makes Coda special !