How to hide and unhide worksheets

In this lesson, we'll look at how to hide and unhide worksheets. You might want to hide worksheets that contain calculations, notes, or lookup data that is not normally needed.

Let's take a look.

As you build more complicated workbooks, you might want to hide certain worksheets to keep things simple.

Here we have a workbook that contains one worksheet for users to enter data and a reference worksheet that contains a lookup table.

The easiest way to hide a worksheet is to right-click the worksheet tab and choose Hide from the menu. The worksheet will disappear, and the tab will no longer be visible at the bottom. The hidden worksheet won't appear in the pop-up menu either.

You can hide as many worksheets as you like, but there must be at least one worksheet visible in the workbook.

To unhide a worksheet, right-click on a visible tab, then choose Unhide from the menu. 

Excel will display a list of all hidden worksheets. Select the worksheet you'd like to unhide, and click OK.

Note, there is no indication that a worksheet is hidden. So, if you hide a worksheet and then share the workbook with someone else, they probably won't notice that a worksheet is hidden. However, they can still find and unhide the worksheet if they know how.

You can also hide an unhide worksheets using the Format menu on the home tab of the Ribbon.

To hide the current worksheet, open the Hide and Unhide menu under Visibility, and select Hide Sheet. To show the hidden worksheet again, select Unhide Sheet from the same menu. If Unhide Sheet is grayed out, there are no hidden worksheets.