Possible ways to hide columns in Excel

When working with a program from Microsoft Office Excel, sometimes it becomes necessary to hide some columns or rows. The reason for this may be an improvement in the readability of the document or simply a desire to hide some calculations or data. In this connection, the users of the software have the question: "How to hide the columns in Excel and how to return their visibility back?".

Ways to hide columns

To improve the ease of use in Excel, the program contains functions that allow you to hide a certain range of cells. It does not matter whether some information is stored in them, or they are empty. In order to achieve the concealment of one or more columns, you must perform one of the following four action algorithms.

• Select the cells of those columns that you want to hide by hovering over the selected range - the column headings will turn to a darker color and right click. In the opened context menu select the command "Hide".
• Having selected the necessary columns in its entirety, press the "Menu" key on the keyboard, which will lead to a similar opening of the context menu, after which also select the "Hide" command.
• Selecting one or more cells in the selected columns, proceed through the following commands. In the Quick Access toolbar, select "Home", then find the "Cells" toolbar in which to click the "Format" icon. In the drop-down list, find the heading "Visibility", which contains the "Hide or show" item, where you select the command "Hide rows".
• To achieve the fastest result, Excel has a set of hotkeys that you can use to hide columns by pressing two buttons on the keyboard. Selecting the cells of the columns that you want to hide, you must press the key combination: "Ctrl" + "0".

As you can see, if you need to understand how to hide columns in Excel, you can learn this easily.

Return visibility to columns

After hiding the columns, there is often a question about how to open hidden columns in Excel. The return of hidden cells is very easy - by selecting a range of cells containing two columns between which there are hidden columns, perform similar actions, as well as hiding them, by selecting the "Show columns" command in the final item. In the case of using hotkeys, just press the combination: "Ctrl" + "Shift" + "0".

What else can you hide?

In addition to the columns, Excel offers the user to hide lines as well as entire sheets. To hide or display rows, you must act in a similar way to how to hide and how to display hidden columns in Excel. The only difference is the choice in the final paragraph of the command "Hide rows" and "Display lines", and a slightly modified combination of keys: "Ctrl" + "9" for hiding and "Ctrl" + "Shift" + "9" to display the lines.

When working with sheets, the process looks somewhat different, in comparison with how to hide columns in Excel. You can hide or display a sheet using the "Format" tab, by selecting "Hide sheet" from the Hide or Show menu, while on the required sheet to hide the sheet. To return visibility, it is enough to do the same procedure by selecting "Display sheet" by selecting the necessary sheets in the window that opens. You can also do this by right-clicking on the panel containing the list of sheets where you can select the hiding or display item.

Specificity of hidden cells

Having understood how to hide lines and how to hide columns in Excel, you can greatly facilitate your work. The advantage of hidden cells is their lack of printing - so you can exclude from the output on paper data that is superfluous, while not editing the document itself. Another advantage is to increase the readability of data - in this case, by hiding unnecessary columns, you can have significant data next to each other.