How to unhide sheets in Excel

Unhide one sheet or several

Hidden sheets leave no gap in the tabs, so the only sign is a formula pointing at a sheet you can't see, or Unhide being available on the tab menu. The Unhide box lists every hidden sheet in the workbook.

Older versions such as Excel 2016 and 2019 only unhide one sheet at a time, so you repeat the steps for each. In Excel for Microsoft 365, hold Ctrl to pick several names, or Shift to pick a block, before you click OK.

1. Right-click any visible sheet tab and choose Unhide.
2. Click the sheet you want, or Ctrl+click several in Microsoft 365.
3. Click OK. The sheets come back in their original position.
4. Ribbon route: Home > Format > Hide & Unhide > Unhide Sheet. Keyboard route on Windows: press Alt, H, O, U, H in turn.

Unhide is greyed out

There are two reasons. The simple one: no sheet in this workbook is hidden, so there's nothing to unhide. Check you're in the right workbook if you have several open.

The other: the workbook's structure is protected. Protect Workbook stops anyone adding, deleting, renaming, moving, hiding or unhiding sheets. On the Review tab, Protect Workbook looks highlighted when it's on. Click it, enter the password if one was set, and Unhide works again. If it's someone else's file and you don't know the password, ask them; sheets are often hidden on purpose to keep lookup tables out of the way.

The sheet isn't in the Unhide list: very hidden sheets

A sheet can be set to very hidden, which keeps it out of the Unhide box completely. You can only set or clear this in the Visual Basic editor, and you don't need to write any code. It works in an .xlsx file too.

If the project asks for a password, the VBA project is locked and you need the owner's password. Very hidden is a way to tidy a workbook, not a security feature: anyone with access to the editor can change it back.

1. Press Alt+F11 to open the Visual Basic editor (on a Mac: Tools > Macro > Visual Basic Editor).
2. In the Project pane on the left (Ctrl+R if it's missing), find your workbook and click the sheet under Microsoft Excel Objects.
3. Press F4 to show the Properties window.
4. Change Visible to -1 - xlSheetVisible.
5. Close the editor. The sheet is back in the tabs.

All the sheet tabs are missing

If you can't see any tabs, the sheets probably aren't hidden; the tab bar is. Go to File > Options > Advanced, scroll to Display options for this workbook, and tick Show sheet tabs.

If that's already ticked, the horizontal scroll bar may have been dragged left over the tabs. Point at the three dots at its left edge and drag them right. A workbook window that's been resized very small, or pushed partly off screen, can also hide the tab bar: double-click the title bar to maximise it. You can still move between sheets with Ctrl+Page Down and Ctrl+Page Up.

Hiding sheets, and a gotcha with View > Unhide

To hide a sheet, right-click its tab and choose Hide. You can't hide the last visible sheet; Excel says a workbook must contain at least one visible worksheet. Formulas that point at a hidden sheet keep working, so hiding a lookup table is a safe way to tidy up.

View > Unhide is something else: it unhides workbook windows, not sheets. You'll see it when the Personal Macro Workbook (PERSONAL.XLSB) or a workbook someone hid with View > Hide is open. If Excel opens with no visible workbook at all, View > Unhide is the fix. For sheets, always use the tab menu or Home > Format.