» Office » 2 Ways to Hide and Unhide Sheets in Excel 2010/2013/2016
If you don't want one or some sheets in an Excel workbook to be viewed by others, it's a good idea to hide the sheet(s). Hiding worksheets can be one way to protect data or just one way to reduce the tabs in an Excel workbook. In this post, we will show you two ways to hide or unhide sheets in Excel 2010/2013/2016. Note that a workbook must contain at least one visible worksheet, so you can't hide all the sheets in an Excel workbook.
1. Open the Excel workbook.
2. Select the sheet you want to hide by clicking on the tab at the bottom. Right-click on the tab, and select Hide from the menu so that the sheet will be hidden.
3. To unhide a sheet, select any visible sheet by clicking on the tab at the bottom, right-click on the tab, and select Unhide from the menu.
4. In the Unhidden dialog box, it lists all the currently hidden sheets. Select the sheet you want to unhide, and click OK.
Through Excel's built-in VBA window, you can make sheets Very Hidden, which is a more secure way to hide and protect the sheets.
Step 1: Open the Excel workbook.
Step 2: Open the Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA for short) window by pressing Alt + F11 on your keyboard.
Step 3: On the left-side pane of the VBA window, it lists all the sheets including all visible and hidden sheets in this Excel workbook. Select the sheet you want to hide, then click View > Properties Window or simply press F4 to display the Properties pane on the lower left of the VBA window.
Step 4: On the Properties pane, drop down until you see the last item named "Visible". The Visible property has three values, -1 – xlSheetVisible, 0 – xlSheetHidden, and 2 – xlSheetVeryHidden. Click the small down arrow button next to the value field and select 2 – xlSheetVeryHidden from the drop-down list so that the selected sheet can be in Very Hidden mode.
Step 5: Close the VBA window, and save the Excel file for the changes to take effect.
When an Excel sheet is set to Very Hidden, you can't unhide it with the Unhide command. To unhide it, you have to open the VBA window and set the Visible property to -1 – xlSheetVisible.
