Learn Excel: Very Hidden Tabs #excel

Key Takeaways

Did you know that there's a secret option in Excel to make worksheets extra hidden? Let me show you how this works. Here, I've built a pretty sweet performance dashboard that I present to the CEO every week. I also have a raw data tab that contains all of the information that feeds into the report. So, as you can imagine, it's important to make sure other users don't mess with the raw data. There are a few things I can do here in Excel. I could open up the review tab and password protect this workbook to prevent users from editing formulas or cells. But in this case, I actually want to hide this sheet from view entirely. So the common approach is to rightclick that tab and choose hide. But the problem is that anyone can simply rightclick a visible sheet, choose unhide, and select that worksheet to restore it. Now I don't want users to even know that a hidden sheet exists. So, what I can do is press Alt F11 or rightclick the tab and click view code to launch the Visual Basic editor. And when I click on that raw data sheet and look at the properties window below, I'll actually see three different visibility options. Visible, hidden, or very hidden. So, check this out. Let's set this sheet to very hidden. Close the editor. And now, when I rightclick, I don't even have the option to unhide. And even if I could, I wouldn't see that very hidden worksheet listed. Now, of course, this doesn't completely protect the data since users can simply view the code to open the editor, select that raw data sheet, and change the property back to visible. But it can be a great way to add one extra layer of security to your Excel workbooks.