How to Hide Formula in Excel?

In excel when you click on any cell it’s content are displayed on the formula bar. Sometimes, we want that formula applied to a cell must not be visible in the formula bar for the sake of protection. Excel allows us to hide the formula applied to any cell and you can even make that no one is allowed even to click on the cell. That means you can restrict the permission to access the cell. To hide the formula in Excel follow the steps below.

Steps to Hide Formula in Excel 2016:

Step 1: Select the cell which has the formula that you want to hide. In the image below you can observe that I have selected a cell which has a formula that you can also see in the formula bar of the sheet.

Step 2: Right-click on the selected cell and among the displayed option click on ‘Format Cells….’.

Step 3: The Format Cells dialog box will appear. By default, the ‘Locked’ checkbox is already checked, which means you can activate the protection over the cell just by defining the password in Protect Sheet.

In this context, we are talking about hiding the formula so, check the Hidden checkbox also and finally click OK.

Step 4: Now to activate the protection over the selected cell, go to the Review tab and under Changes group click on Protect Sheet.

Step 5: A Protect Sheet dialog box appears & ask for the ‘password’ which would be required when you would unprotect the sheet. Put your password and the section below it shows the kind of access that you are granting to the user of this worksheet.

In case, if you want that no one should be allowed even to touch the locked cells then you can uncheck the Select locked cells checkbox.

Finally, click OK.

A Confirm Password dialog box will appear. Re-enter your password and click OK.

Step 6: Now, click the cell that you have processed, it’s content won’t appear on the formula bar. Observe the image below, the cell which I have processed when clicked don’t show its content in the formula bar.

In step 3, we have seen that under Protection tab, of Format Cells dialog box, by default the cell is Locked and in further steps, we have activated this protection by providing it with a password. So this cell is locked and if you want to change its content it will blink a message that:
“The cell or chart you are trying to change is on a protected sheet. To make a change, unprotected the sheet. You might be requested to enter a password“. If you agree then click OK.

It means you can not change the content of the cell until you unprotect the sheet with the password

But, if you want to hide the formula without protecting the sheet,  that means you want to permit the user to access the cell and change its content then you just have to uncheck the Locked checkbox of Format Cells dialog box and click OK.

In this case, you can change the content of the cell. It is not that with the above step you can only hide the formula present in the cell. The steps above allow you to hide any content present in the cell.

So, this is all about the steps to hide the formula in Excel. Hope the content is helpful. Keep reading.