In this article, I’ll walk you through the different content that can be hidden in Excel and how to get view the hidden data at a later time. The first part will cover how to hide data in Excel and the second part will cover how to get access to hidden data.

How to Hide Tabs/WorkSheets

To hide a worksheet or tab in Excel, right-click on the tab and choose “Hide.” That was pretty straightforward. ..

To unhide a sheet, right-click on it and select Unhide. All hidden sheets will be shown in a list and you can select the one you want to unhide.

How to Hide Cells

Excel does not have the ability to “hide” a cell in the traditional sense that they simply disappear until you unhide them, like in the example above with sheets. It can only blank out a cell so that it appears that nothing is in the cell, but it cannot truly “hide” a cell because if a cell is hidden, what would you replace that cell with? ..

You can hide entire rows and columns in Excel, but you can only blank out individual cells. Right-click on a cell or multiple selected cells and then click on Format Cells.

To create a custom number format, on the Number tab, choose Custom and enter three semicolons (;;;) into the Type box. ..

To hide data in a cell, you can click on the cell and then click on the OK button. The data in the cell will now be hidden, but you can still see the formula bar. ..

To unhide the cells, follow these steps:

  1. Choose the original format of the cells rather than Custom.
  2. Note that if you type anything into those cells, it will automatically be hidden after you press Enter.
  3. Also, whatever original value was in the hidden cell will be replaced when typing into the hidden cell. ..

Hide Gridlines

Hiding gridlines can be a helpful way to make your data presentation more clean. You can hide all gridlines on the entire worksheet, or you can hide gridlines for a certain portion of the worksheet. To hide all gridlines on the entire worksheet:

  1. Open Excel and select the worksheet you want to hide gridlines on.
  2. On the Home tab, in the Editing group, click Gridlines.
  3. In the Gridline Options dialog box, select Hide All Gridlines on Sheet from the Display options list. To hide gridlines for a certain portion of the worksheet:
  4. Open Excel and select the worksheet you want to hide gridlines on.
  5. On the Home tab, in the Editing group, click Gridlines.
  6. In the Gridline Options dialog box, select Hide Grid Lines in Selected Area from the Display options list (see Figure A). Figure A: The Gridline Options dialog box ..

To hide all gridlines, you can click on the View tab and then uncheck the Gridlines box.

You can also disable gridlines on a page by clicking on the Page Layout tab and unchecking the View box under Gridlines. ..

How to Hide Rows and Columns

To hide an entire row or column, right-click on the row or column header and then choose Hide. To hide a row or multiple rows, you need to right-click on the row number at the far left. To hide a column or multiple columns, you need to right-click on the column letter at the very top.

Excel displays hidden rows and columns by displaying two visible lines. ..

To unhide a row or column, you need to select the row/column before and the row/column after the hidden row/column.

How to Hide Formulas

If you want to hide a formula, you have to do TWO things: set the cells to Hidden and then protect the sheet.

I have a sheet with some proprietary formulas that I want to keep hidden from everyone.

I will right-click and choose Format Cells. Now click on the Protection tab and check the box that says Hidden.

As you can see from the message, hiding formulas won’t go into effect until you actually protect the worksheet. You can do this by clicking on the Review tab and then clicking on Protect Sheet.

You can prevent people from un-hiding the formulas by entering in a password. Now you’ll notice that if you try to view the formulas, by pressing CTRL + ~ or by clicking on Show Formulas on the Formulas tab, they will not be visible, however, the results of that formula will remain visible.

Hide Comments

If you want to add a comment to an Excel cell, you can do so by clicking on the arrow in the upper right corner and then selecting the comment from the pop up window that appears.

You can change the behavior of the arrow and comment in this cell so that they are not shown when hovering or selecting it. The comment will still remain and can be viewed by simply going to the Review tab and clicking on Show All Comments. To hide the comments, click on File and then Options.

Scroll down to the Display section and select No comment or indicators under the For cells with comments, show: heading.

Hide Overflow Text

If you type a lot of text into a cell in Excel, it will simply overflow over the adjacent cells. ..

If I were to type something into cell B1, it would then cut off the overflow and show the contents of B1. If you want this behavior without having to type anything into the adjacent cell, you can right-click on the cell, choose Format Cells and then select Fill from the Fill drop down box.

If you want to hide the overflow text for a cell even if nothing is in the adjacent cell, use the “hide” command. This is kind of a hack, but it usually works. ..

You could also choose Format Cells and then check the Wrap Text box under Text control on the Alignment tab, but that will increase the height of the row. To get around that, you could simply right-click on the row number and then click on Row Height to adjust the height back to its original value. Either of these two methods will work for hiding overflow text. ..

Hide Workbook

I’m not sure why you would want or need to do this, but you can also click on the View tab and click on the Hide button under Split. This will hide the entire workbook in Excel! There is absolutely nothing you can do other than clicking on the Unhide button to bring back the workbook.

You’ve learned how to hide workbooks, sheets, rows, columns, gridlines, comments, cells, and formulas in Excel. If you have any questions or feedback, post a comment below. Enjoy!