A Excel workbook is actually a container, a bit like a folder. Each Excel workbook can contain one or more worksheets and it is the worksheet that is the actual container of information. Worksheets are identified by a tab which bears the name of the sheet. Clicking a tab activates that particular sheet.

In exactly the same way that Microsoft Excel allows you to hide columns, it is also possible to hide entire worksheets. Hiding a worksheet is particularly useful where you have a workbook that contains a lot of sheets. Naturally hidden worksheets can be made visible again by using the Unhide command. It is possible to hide either an individual sheet or to hide a group of sheets. However sheets can only be unhidden one sheet at a time.

To hide a single sheet, simply right-click on the sheet tab and choose Hide. The corresponding worksheet will then disappear. There is also a ribbon command which will do the same thing. First, highlight the sheet by clicking on its tab and then, in the Cell section of the Home Tab of Excel Ribbon, choose Format-Visibility-Hide and Unhide-Hide.

To hide more than one sheet, simply highlight the sheets by clicking on the first holding down the Control key and clicking on each of the others. Next, right-click on one of the highlighted sheet tabs and choose Hide.

To make a hidden worksheet visible again, you can right-click on any sheet tab and choose Unhide. The Unhide dialog then appears. Unfortunately, it isn’t possible to select more than one sheet to unhide; if you try Control-click or Shift-click, you’ll see that only one sheet can be highlighted. Highlight the name of the sheet that you want to make visible and click OK.

You can also use the ribbon command Format-Visibility-Hide and Unhide-UnHide Sheet. When the Unhide dialog appears, highlight the sheet you want to unhide and click OK. You’ll notice that when sheets are unhidden they return to the positions that they originally occupied.

As well as hiding sheets, it is also possible to make a worksheet very hidden. A very hidden worksheet is not shown in the Unhide dialog and therefore cannot be unhidden in the normal way. To make a worksheet very hidden, open the Visual Basic Editor by going to the Developer tab of the ribbon and clicking on Visual Basic button. Next, if they are not already visible, choose Project Explorer and Properties Window from the View menu. Select the sheet that you want to make very hidden in the Project Explorer. Finally, in the Properties Window, change the value of the Visible setting to 2-xlSheetVeryHidden.

The author is a trainer and developer with an independent computer training company offering Excel Classes in London and throughout the UK.

Read expert info to free website traffic – welcome to your own guide.

 Viewed 350 times by 224 viewers