Protection problems

I have an excel table which is used by tens of other people to imput data monthly. It seems that it is impossible to keep it in shape (confitional formating, links,...) just by instructing the users not to copy-paste stuff from their personal work spaces and thus accidentally also overide the definitions. So, I need excel protection. I have encountered two problems:
1) Protection doesn't seem to protect the hyperlinks. The links even in the protected cells seem to change after the updates of some of the users. Any ways to avoid this?
2) How can I protect a sheet so that the grouping show/hide functions still work on that protected sheet?

The problem appears (I think) when people have their own copies of the table and maintain their data on it and then, on the reporting date,
they just copy paste their part of the table on top of the shared copy. Protection of the sheet is easy but the show/hide groups seem to stop function no matter what protection options I use (...of course
I could write a macro...). In the attached sample there is a separate 'link safe' sheet and even with the protection on it it seems to get overridden (eventhough nobody should have any need to go into it).
I would really appreciate hints how to do this without macros.