You can hide any worksheet in a workbook to remove it from view. You can also hide the workbook window of a workbook to remove it from your workspace. The data in hidden worksheets and workbook windows is not visible, but it can still be referenced from other worksheets and workbooks. You can display hidden worksheets or workbook windows as needed.
By default, all workbooks that you open are displayed on the taskbar, but you can hide or display them on the taskbar as needed.
Note: The screen shots in this article were taken in Excel 2016. If you have a different version of your view might be slightly different, but unless otherwise noted, the functionality is the same.
Hide or unhide a worksheet
When you unhide a worksheet, you can only do so one at a time unless you use Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) code..
If worksheets are hidden by VBA code that assigns the property xlSheetVeryHidden, the Unhide command will not display those hidden sheets. If you are using a workbook that contains VBA code and you encounter problems with hidden worksheets, contact the workbook owner for more information.
Hide or display workbook windows on the Windows taskbar
Excel 2013 introduced Single Document Interface, where each workbook opens in its own window.
Hide or unhide a worksheet
Hide or unhide a workbook window
Click the Window menu, click Hide or Unhide.
Sheet tabs are helpful for organizing and identifying the worksheets in a workbook. You'll find them along the bottom of your workbook.
To avoid clutter or to display only specific worksheets to others, you can hide as many sheets as you want, as long as at least one sheet remains in view. Just right-click the sheet tab for the sheet you want hidden, and click Hide.
If you want to see a hidden worksheet, here’s how you unhide it:
Right-click any sheet tab and click Unhide.
In the Unhide box, click the sheet you want to unhide, and click OK.
Note: Want to unhide multiple worksheets? Just repeat the unhide steps for each sheet.
Not sure if there are any hidden worksheets? Right-click any sheet tab and verify if Unhide is available. If it isn’t available, like in this picture, your workbook doesn’t have any hidden worksheets.
Working with sheets
In addition to hiding and unhiding worksheets, you can insert a new sheet, or delete, rename, and reorder existing worksheets using the sheet tabs. Here's how:
Delete sheet tabs
Important: If you delete a sheet tab, you’re also deleting the worksheet and its data. To avoid losing your data, if you don’t want to display it, consider hiding the sheet tab instead.
Right-click the sheet tab of the worksheet you want to delete and click Delete.
Rename sheet tabs
Right-click the sheet tab of the worksheet you want to rename.
Click Rename and type a new name.
Tip: Sheet tabs resize automatically to fit the name.
When you have many sheet tabs with long names, you may not be able to see all of them. Scroll to the last visible sheet tab, and try clicking the Activate the next hidden sheet button (the three dots after the last visible sheet tab).
You can hide sheets using the context menu called by right-clicking on the sheet label. As described in the previous lesson. But sheets can be hidden so that they are not visible even in the list of hidden sheets. Moreover, without using the protection of the book structure. To implement this task, you need to use the parameters that are available in the VBA editor mode (Alt+F11).
The best way to hide a sheet in Excel
For clarity, let's look at an example. Hide “Sheet3” in the usual way (using the “Hide” option in the context menu).
And “Sheet2” will be hidden using the parameters of the VBA macro editor. To do this, perform the following steps:
We do not see our “Sheet3” in the lists of hidden sheets. It is safely hidden. To see it again, you need to go to the VBA editor and change the parameters in the “Visible” property to “-1-xlSheetVisible”.
Note. The third parameter “0-xlSheetHidden” gives the same result as normal hiding of a sheet using the context menu.Helpful advice. You can visually hide sheet labels:
But in both the first and second cases, you can switch between sheets using the hotkey combination CTRL+PageUp and CTRL+PageDown.
Useful Lifehack in Excel
To prevent inserting new rows and columns in Excel without using sheet protection, you need to do this:
That's all, now you can't insert a row or column into the sheet. If you need to prohibit inserting only rows, then enter any value in the very last row (for example, A1048576). And if you prohibit inserting only columns, then enter any value in the last column (for example, XFD1).
Securely hide sheets that cannot be displayed using standard means (the Show option). Useful lifehacks for working with sheets and cells.
In order to be able to hide information from prying eyes, and perhaps from your own, Excel 2007 and higher provides the ability to hide sheets. In this case, you can make the sheets of the workbook either hidden or very hidden, and, if necessary, make them visible again, that is, display (show).
How to make a sheet hidden?
Making a sheet hidden is very simple; to do this, you need to right-click on the tab of the desired sheet and select “Hide” in the context menu that appears. In order to hide several sheets in a row, or all sheets except the active one (the workbook must contain at least one visible sheet), you need to left-click on the first desired sheet, then, while holding down the Shift key, click on the last one, then right-click mouse button in the area of the selected sheets and select "Hide" from the context menu. All selected sheets become hidden at once. Similarly, you can selectively select sheets by using the Ctrl key instead of the Shift key.
How to make a sheet very hidden?
Workbook sheets can be made very hidden. Such sheets cannot be displayed using standard Excel tools; when calling the context menu, the “Display...” item (in some versions it is called “Show...”) is not active. To make a sheet very hidden, you need to go to the VB (Visual Basic) editor, this can be done in different ways, but the easiest way is by using the Alt+F11 key combination, select the desired sheet in the VBA workbook project, and then in the “Visible” property of this sheet select the "xlSheetVeryHidden" parameter.
To return the sheet to visibility, you need to change the "Visible" property back to xlSheetVisible.
How to show hidden sheets?
The reverse procedure, when it becomes necessary to display hidden sheets and make them visible, may require a lot of patience. To show hidden sheets you need toRight-click in the sheet name area and select the "Display..." menu item.
After this, a window appears with a list of hidden sheets and hidden sheets are displayed on the screen by selecting one sheet from the entire list. It will not be possible to display them all at once.
You will have to make the sheets visible one at a time. Displaying even ten hidden sheets will be quite a tedious task, let alone more of them.
What should I do if I can’t hide or show a sheet?
If the workbook structure is protected, the “Hide” and “Show” items of the context menu will be inactive. In order to perform any actions with sheets, you must remove book protection .
Displaying all sheets, selectively displaying and hiding sheets by mask
The Excel add-in presented below allows you to facilitate and speed up some of the manipulations performed with workbook sheets. The add-on allows you to:
1) Make all sheets hidden except the active one;
2) make all sheets except the active one very hidden;
3) display all hidden sheets at once, regardless of whether they are hidden or very hidden;
4) hide and show sheets by mask, using special matching characters for sheet names.
Excel has three levels of sheet visibility: visible, hidden, and very hidden. Visible The sheet appears in the sheet list of sheets in the workbook. Hidden The sheet is not displayed in the list, but it can be displayed using standard methods. So-called Very hidden a mode that can only be set and removed using macros. Very hidden sheets are not displayed in the list of sheets, moreover, they are not displayed in the "Display Hidden Sheet" dialog box.
Since most Excel users do not know about this method, it is convenient to use if you need to hide part of the information.
How to make a sheet very hidden
Method number 1. Via VBA-Excel add-in
The most convenient way, which does not require special knowledge and also allows you to quickly hide a large number of sheets, is to install the VBA-Excel add-in. In order to hide or show sheets in Excel you must:
Method number 2. Using the sheets property in the code editor
To hide a sheet you need to:
To display a hidden sheet, you can set the value in a similar way -1 - xlSheetVisible.
Method No. 3. Using Macros
We can say that this is the most difficult method, but also more universal. Using programming, you can set various conditions for hiding sheets and much more. But let’s just focus on hiding/displaying for now.
- Open the code editor with a keyboard shortcut Alt+F11.
- In the left menu, expand the project with the same name as your book.
- Create a new module (if you don't already have one) in which we will write the code to hide the sheets.
- Go to the module and paste the following code into it:
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