How to Hide Worksheets (and how to make them visible again)
Hiding worksheets is another great way to keep your workbook organised. There can be plenty of reasons why you might wish to hide a worksheet. For example, if you have a worksheet that contains ‘helper values’1 for a calculation you make on a different sheet, hiding this helper sheet improve the readability of your workbook. After all, if it only contains background information that doesn’t add value for the viewer of the file, it makes sense to hide the sheet.
Note
One of the rules in Excel is that there is at least one visible worksheet in a file. If you wish to hide specific data in your workbook, you will need to place them on their own sheet. In case you need help regarding adding worksheets, you can find out in my post How To Add Worksheets.
Step 1: Hiding Worksheets
Right click on the worksheet tab of the worksheet you want to hide (I used Sheet2 for the example). Right clicking will bring up the menu you can see below. In here, click on Hide which is located in the middle of the menu.
You can see that Unhide is currently greyed out, as there is currently no hidden sheet in this workbook. Once you clicked on Hide, the worksheet will now not show up on the worksheet tab anymore.
Step 2: Unhiding Worksheets
To unhide a sheet, eight click on any visible sheet. In this case it does not matter which one it is, as we need to access the menu but don’t actually do anything to the selected sheet.
You will see that the Unhide field is now selectable. This will bring up a little pop-up menu where you will need to select the sheets you wish to Unhide. In my example, there is only one sheet hidden. If you have several hidden sheets, you will see them all in that list. Sheet names with a green background means they are selected to be unhidden. Confirm with OK once you made your selection.
Your worksheet will show up again in the worksheet tab bar. Excel will placed it the same position it was before it was hidden. If you wish to change the order of your worksheets, you will need to manually move them.
- Helper Values: I don’t think there is a fixed definition for this (and it might not even be commonly used phrasing). Personally I define Helper Values in a spreadsheet as anything that helps me to get to my destination, like a part of a calculation (where the viewer of the spreadsheet does not need to see that step of the calculation to make sense of the results shown on the spreadsheet). Another usage case might be the plot point for a chart—the chart is the part that should stay visible, hiding the calculation can tidy up the view). ↩︎