How to Hide and Unhide Rows & Columns in Excel?

Have you ever hide and unhide rows & columns in excel? In some excel sheets we store our everyday information like attendance of office staff, we create an everyday to-do list etc. Putting everyday data in an Excel sheet creates numerous rows and columns in the sheet. Too many columns and rows in the sheet makes it voluminous. Analysing such a voluminous spreadsheet become a headache.

In fact, sometimes we don’t even need to analyse the entire data we only need to inspect some part of the data. In this case, there may be some rows or columns in the sheet which we may not want to review in our current investigation. So, instead of deleting those rows and columns we can hide it for some time till we are examining data of our interest & when we are done we can unhide the hidden rows or columns.

The hidden rows and columns do not appear on the sheet as their size is reduced to zero. While printing the excel sheet, the hidden rows and columns of an excel sheet do not get printed. Let us move to the steps to hide and unhide columns in excel.

Steps to Hide and Unhide Rows & Columns in Excel:

Hide Columns in Excel

Step 1: Select the number of columns from the column header that you want to hide. Like, in the image below you can see that I have selected column C and Column D.

Step 2: Right-click on the selected column and you will see some options. From the given options you have to select Hide.

You can easily recognize the hidden columns in the sheet. As the alphabets representing the hidden columns will be missing from column header and you can see two very small parallel lines in the column header in place of hidden columns as you can see in the image below.

Hide Rows in Excel

Step 1: Select the number of rows from the row header that you want to hide. As you can see in the image below I have selected row 4 and 5.

Step 2: Right-click on the selected rows and some options will appear. Among the displayed options select Hide.

Like columns, you can easily recognize the hidden rows in the Excel sheet. As the numbers representing the hidden rows will be missing from the row header. Two very small parallel line will appear in the row header, in place of hidden rows as you can see in the image below.

Unhide Columns in Excel

Step 1: Select the column before the hidden column and the column after the hidden column. In the image below you can see that I have selected column B and column E as I want to unhide column C and column D.

Step 2: Right-click on the selected columns and it will display some options. Among the displayed option click on Unhide.

Now, the hidden columns between the selected columns will now start appearing on the Excel sheet. You can observe the image below, column C and column D are appearing on the screen.

Unhide Rows in Excel

Step 1: Select the row before the hidden row and the row after the hidden rows in the row header. Observe the image below, as you can see that row 4 and row 5 is hidden that’s why I have selected row 3 and row 6.

Step 2: Right-click on the selected rows and it will display some options. Among the displayed option click on Unhide.

Now, the hidden rows will start appearing on the excel sheet. In the image below, you can observe that row 4 and row 5 are now appearing on the Excel sheet.

So, this is all about hiding and unhiding the rows and columns in the Excel sheet.