How to Completely Hide an Excel Worksheet

Excel has three levels of worksheet visibility: visible, hidden, and very hidden. While many people know about hiding and unhiding worksheets by right-clicking the tab area at the bottom of the workbook, this is only an intermediate way to remove Excel sheets from view.

Whether you want to tidy up your workbook tabs, have a dedicated sheet for drop-down list options and other controls, leave only the most important sheets visible, or conceal information you don’t want others to see, you can make worksheets very hidden in Excel. Taking this step reduces the chances of other people making those worksheets visible again.

Here’s how you can do this.

Before you start, make sure your workbook is saved by pressing Ctrl+S.

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Now, press Alt+11 to open the Visual Basics For Applications (VBA) window, or add the Developer tab to the ribbon and click “Visual Basic.”

The next steps involve activating the necessary panes that enable you to change a worksheet’s visibility status to “Very Hidden.” First, click “View” on the ribbon, then click “Project Explorer.” If you prefer using Excel keyboard shortcuts, press Alt > V > Ctrl+R.

Then, click “View” again, and this time, click “Properties Window.” Alternatively, press Alt > V > F4.

Now, in the Project Explorer pane, expand the options until you see a list of the worksheets in your workbook, and click the sheet you want to hide.

Next, in the Properties window, select “xlsSheetVeryHidden” in the Visible drop-down menu.

Finally, click the “Save” button in the top-left corner of the VBA window, and click “X” in the top-right corner to close it. Alternatively, press Ctrl+S, then Alt+F4.

Now, see that the tab for the very hidden worksheet isn’t visible. What’s more, when you right-click the workbook tab area, the Unhide option is grayed out, as though the workbook doesn’t contain any hidden sheets.

To show the sheet again, head back to the VBA window by pressing Alt+F11, select the relevant worksheet in the Project Explorer pane, change the Visible status to “xlSheetVisible,” and save and close the VBA window.

Things to Note When Making a Worksheet Very Hidden

Here are a few extra pointers you should note before you go ahead and hide worksheets using this method:

• Although more secure than right-clicking a tab and clicking “Hide,” making a worksheet very hidden isn’t a fail-safe method to stop people from accessing sensitive data stored in your workbook. Indeed, if they stumble upon this article, they’ll know how to make a very hidden sheet visible again! If other people have access to a file containing confidential information, consider password-protecting the workbook instead.

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• Even though not many people know about the option to make a worksheet very hidden, some do. To account for this, at the top of any worksheet that I hide, I always type a note like “This worksheet is for reference only” or similar.
• Formulas in visible sheets that reference cells in very hidden sheets still work as expected.

As well as hiding whole worksheets within Excel workbooks, you can also hide rows and columns within worksheets by right-clicking the row number or column letter, and selecting “Hide.” To hide multiple adjacent rows or columns, first, click and drag your mouse to select more than one row number or column letter at the same time. On the other hand, to select non-sequential rows and columns to hide, press Ctrl as you click on the row numbers or column letters.