Thanks @morlandin. You have started me thinking at the right direction. It seems that once we have set password at the sheet level, all the cells are by default locked (on second thought, this seems obvious). So, if we want to unlock a cell we have to mention explicitly <property name="net.sf.jasperreports.export.xls.cell.locked" value="false"/> So, the below code will produce an excel sheet where "Static Text" cell will be locked and "Static Text22" cell will be unlocked. Hope this example will help others and they will not have to go round and round at it like me. <jasperReport xmlns="http://jasperreports.sourceforge.net/jasperreports" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://jasperreports.sourceforge.net/jasperreports http://jasperreports.sourceforge.net/xsd/jasperreport.xsd" name="Blank_A4" pageWidth="595" pageHeight="842" columnWidth="555" leftMargin="20" rightMargin="20" topMargin="20" bottomMargin="20" uuid="3bff4add-3bc7-49b8-acd4-0ec822191576"><property name="com.jaspersoft.studio.data.defaultdataadapter" value="One Empty Record"/><property name="net.sf.jasperreports.export.xls.password" value="test_password"/><queryString><![CDATA[]]></queryString><background><band splitType="Stretch"/></background><title><band height="79" splitType="Stretch"><staticText><reportElement x="123" y="2" width="100" height="30" uuid="c9f7abf8-2ed4-44c3-abf5-84fda5d190f4"/><text><![CDATA[static Text]]></text></staticText><staticText><reportElement x="223" y="2" width="100" height="30" uuid="d95b84d7-5d1b-4919-b4f0-82a30c9effd6"><property name="net.sf.jasperreports.export.xls.cell.locked" value="false"/></reportElement><text><![CDATA[static Text22]]></text></staticText></band></title></jasperReport>