I wrote an Apps Script file to protect cells on-edit, and it was working for a while, but it stopped working recently. I suspect I hit some sort of cap on the number of protected ranges one sheet can have. I’d rather not delete thousands of protected ranges manually, so I’m trying to write a script that will remove all protections automatically when run.

I visited the Class Protection page of the Apps Script documentation site. It recommended a script to do exactly what I need, but that script times out and throws an error when run. The code is below:

function removeProtections() {
  var ss = SpreadsheetApp.getActive();
  var protections = ss.getProtections(SpreadsheetApp.ProtectionType.RANGE);
  for (var i = 0; i < protections.length; i++) {
    var protection = protections[i];
    if (protection.canEdit()) {
      protection.remove();
    }
  }
}

In the execution log, I see two messages: First, a notice message saying “Execution started.” Second, after the execution runs for a while, I get an error message saying “Exceeded maximum execution time.”