A Microsoft Excel workbook is essentially a container, a bit like a folder. Each Excel workbook can hold one or more worksheets and it is the worksheet that is the actual container of one's information. Worksheets are identified by a tab which shows the name of each sheet. Clicking the appropriate tab activates a 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 just one sheet, just right-click on the sheet tab and choose Hide. The corresponding worksheet will then simply disappear. There is also a ribbon command which will do exactly the same thing. First, you highlight the sheet by clicking on its tab and then, in the Cells section of the Home Tab of Excel Ribbon, choose Format-Visibility-Hide and Unhide-Hide.

To hide more than one sheet at a time, simply select the sheets by clicking on the first, holding down the Control key on your keyboard and clicking on each of the others. Next, right-click on any 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.

Mark Matthews

The writer of this article is a developer and trainer with On-SiteTrainingCourses.Com, an independent computer training company offering Microsoft Excel training courses in London and throughout the UK.

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