Microsoft Excel: Hide or show worksheets or workbooks

You can hide any worksheet in a workbook to remove it from view. You can also hide the workbook window of a workbook to remove it from your workspace. The data in hidden worksheets and workbook windows is not visible, but it can still be referenced from other worksheets and workbooks. You can display hidden worksheets or workbook windows as needed.

By default, all workbook that you open are displayed on the taskbar, but you can hide or display them on the taskbar as needed.

Note: The screen shots in this article were taken in Excel 2016. If you have a different version your view might be slightly different, but unless otherwise noted, the functionality is the same.

Sheet tabs are helpful for organizing and identifying the worksheets in a workbook. You’ll find them along the bottom of your workbook.

sheet tabs

To avoid clutter or to display only specific worksheets to others, you can hide as many sheets as you want, as long as at least one sheet remains in view. Just right-click the sheet tab for the sheet you want hidden, and click Hide.

Right-click the sheet tab and click Hide to hide a worksheet.

Unhide worksheets

If you want to see a hidden worksheet, here’s how you unhide it:

Right-click any sheet tab and click Unhide.
In the Unhide box, click the sheet you want to unhide, and click OK.

Unhide worksheets

Note: Want to unhide multiple worksheets? Just repeat the unhide steps for each sheet.

Not sure if there are any hidden worksheets? Right-click any sheet tab and verify if Unhide is available. If it isn’t available, like in this picture, your workbook doesn’t have any hidden worksheets.

UnHide option is grayed out indicating no hidden worksheets

Working with sheets

In addition to hiding and unhiding worksheets, you can insert a new sheet, or delete, rename, and reorder existing worksheets using the sheet tabs. Here’s how:

Delete sheet tabs

Important: If you delete a sheet tab, you’re also deleting the worksheet and its data. To avoid losing your data, if you don’t want to display it, consider hiding the sheet tab instead.

Right-click the sheet tab of the worksheet you want to delete and click Delete.

Rename sheet tabs

Right-click the sheet tab of the worksheet you want to rename.
Click Rename and type a new name.

Tip: Sheet tabs resize automatically to fit the name.

When you have many sheet tabs with long names, you may not be able to see all of them. Scroll to the last visible sheet tab, and try clicking theActivate the next hidden sheet button (the three dots after the last visible sheet tab).

Button to display the hidden worksheet tabs

Reorder sheet tabs

Here’s how you can reorder one worksheet at a time so that you have a customized sheet order:

Right-click the sheet tab of the worksheet you want to move and pick Reorder.
In the Move selected sheet box, click the sheet before which you want to move the selected sheet and click OK.

In this example, Sheet 6 appears after Sheet 8 and the reordering will move it before Sheet 7.

Click on a sheet tab and drag it to a new order

This article was originally published here.