Locking rows?

In order to prevent accidentally scrambling data sets in Excel when sorting, is it possible to lock the rows in some way so that only the whole rows are moved, not a subset of columns?

Cheers

Well, thanks for trying to help, but there aren't any empty columns (??). I don't know why you think there are.

Imagine a spreadsheet with 10 columns of data A to J in 3000 rows and you select rows B to F for some reason. Now imagine that they are the only columns you can see on screen and you sort by column C and D and don't notice that you've only sorted part of the data and effectively scrambled it. Not only that, but Excel 2003 didn't say "do you want to expand the selction?", which it often doesn't. Now imagine that you have saved the file and the next time you open it you realise that something's gone wrong.

Now, is there any way to prevent this happening by making the data unsortable if you haven't selected all of it? EG by "locking" the rows in some way?

Please don't tell me about back-ups or databases, as this is a question about doing this in Excel. Is it possible? If so, how. Also, I don't want to protect the sheet as that makes it impossible to make any changes at all.

Cheers

~

I guess it can't be done, then?