How to make Excel columns read-only but re-sizable in EPPlus C# ?

Question

In my MVC project, users can select some products in the UI and download the related product information in Excel (.xlsx) format.

Our business requirements is, apart from few columns/cells the file should be read-only. I'm using EPPlus 4.0.4 to generate the Excel, and it's working great so far.

The issues I'm facing here is, the moment I make the worksheet protected, user cannot re-size the columns anymore (dragging the header to change column width). So, texts in some columns are not visible completely. To fix that, I made them AutoFit (## in code below). So, texts are visible now. But still, user cannot change the column widths which they should be able to.

So my questions is, can I make the cells/columns read-only but make them re-sizable like normal Excel?

My code below

//using OfficeOpenXml;
//using OfficeOpenXml.Style;
private void ProtectExcel(ExcelWorksheet ws, int columnCount)
{
    ws.Protection.AllowSort = true;
    ws.Protection.AllowSelectUnlockedCells = true;
    ws.Protection.AllowAutoFilter = true;

    for (int i = 1; i <= columnCount; i++)
    {
        ws.Column(i).Style.Locked = true; //making read-only
        ws.Column(i).AutoFit(); //## showing all text
    }

    ws.Protection.IsProtected = true; //making the sheet protected 
}

Answer 1

There are many properties on the ws.Protection property to specify what will be protected. One is AllowFormatColumns, so:

ws.Protection.AllowFormatColumns = true;