Hiding Data

IF YOUR WORKBOOK CONTAINS private company data or confidential information, you do not need to show it if you don’t want to—you can hide it instead. In addition, if a workbook contains data that simply supports the main data, there’s no need to bore people with it—hide it from view so the workbook’s most important data remains the focus. In Chapter 6, “Managing Large Amounts of Excel Data,” you learned how to hide rows and columns, and even a single cell’s data. In this section, you learn how to hide an entire worksheet or workbook.

Hiding Worksheets

When you hide a worksheet, its tab disappears. Now, if you rename your worksheets, it might not be obvious to your average user that a worksheet is secretly hidden. However, if you don’t, a user might get suspicious that Sheet2 is hidden if he or she sees only two worksheets: Sheet1 and Sheet3. In any case, even though a worksheet is hidden, its data can still be referenced in formulas, elsewhere in the workbook.

To hide a worksheet, follow these steps:

If you want to prevent someone from unhiding your hidden sheets, you must protect the work-book—see the section “Protecting Data” for more information. Assuming the workbook is not protected, it’s pretty easy to unhide a sheet assuming you know to even try. To unhide a sheet, click the Format button on the Home tab, point to Hide & Unhide, and select Unhide Sheet from the pop-up menu. The Unhide dialog box appears, as shown in Figure 13-3. You can also right-click any visible sheet tab and select Unhide from the pop-up menu to display the Unhide dialog box.

A list of all the hidden sheets appears in the Unhide dialog box. Select the sheet you want to display from the Unhide Sheet list and click OK. The hidden sheet magically reappears.

Hiding a Workbook

The main reason for hiding a workbook is to make it quickly disappear from the screen. For example, you might be working on a departmental budget worksheet that reveals you will only have three salespeople next year instead of five. Should someone from your department walk up while you’re crunching numbers, it would be great if you could quickly hide the evidence that two people are about to be let go. With the click of one button, you can remove the worksheet from screen.

To hide the currently displayed workbook, click the Hide button on the View tab. The workbook is immediately removed from the screen, as shown in Figure 13-4. When a workbook is hidden, it remains open during your Excel work session. If you try to end your work session without redisplaying a hidden workbook, Excel will tap you on the shoulder and ask if you want to save it before it’s closed. Click Save in the dialog box that appears to save the hidden workbook’s data; if you don’t want to end the session, click Cancel.

Figure 13-4. Hide a workbook quickly using the Hide button.

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As you can see in Figure 13-4, there’s nothing onscreen that obviously gives away the fact that a workbook is currently open but hidden. To unhide a workbook, click the Unhide button on the View tab. The Unhide dialog box appears, listing any hidden workbooks (see Figure 13-5). Select the workbook you want to redisplay from the Unhide Workbook list and click OK.