Excel Tips – Hide / Unhide Worksheets, Columns, Rows and Cell Content
How to Hide Worksheets or Tabs
In order to hide a worksheet or tab in Excel, right-click on the tab and choose Hide. That was pretty straightforward.
Once hidden, you can right-click on a visible sheet and select Unhide. All hidden sheets will be shown in a list and you can select the one you want to unhide.
How to Hide Rows and Columns
If you want to hide an entire row or column, right-click on the row or column header and then choose Hide. To hide a row or multiple rows, you need to right-click on the row number at the far left. To hide a column or multiple columns, you need to right-click on the column letter at the very top.
You can easily tell there are hidden rows and columns in Excel because the numbers or letters skip and there are two visible lines shown to indicate hidden columns or rows.
To unhide a row or column, you need to select the row/column before and the row/column after the hidden row/column. For example, if Column B is hidden, you would need to select column A and column C and then right-click and choose Unhide to unhide it.
How to Hide Cell Content
Excel does not have the ability to hide a cell in the traditional sense that they simply disappear until you unhide them, like in the example above with sheets. It can only blank out a cell so that it appears that nothing is in the cell, but it can’t truly “hide” a cell because if a cell is hidden, what would you replace that cell with?
You can hide entire rows and columns in Excel, as I explained above, but you can only blank out individual cells. Right-click on a cell or multiple selected cells and then click on Format Cells.
On the Number tab, choose Custom at the bottom and enter three semicolons (;;;) without the parentheses into the Type box.
Click OK and now the data in those cells is hidden. You can click on the cell and you should see the cell remains blank, but the data in the cell shows up in the formula bar.
To unhide the cells, follow the same procedure above, but this time choose the original format of the cells rather than Custom. Note that if you type anything into those cells, it will automatically be hidden after you press Enter. Also, whatever original value was in the hidden cell will be replaced when typing into the hidden cell.
