TechBits: Hiding with Excel

Sometimes you may want to or need to be a digital pack rat in an Excel spreadsheet but not want the visual ‘noise’. There are three ways to hide data in Excel: hide a row, a column or hide select cells.

By way of example

Let’s say we’re working with a spreadsheet that looks like this before any changes are made.

Hiding a column

Let’s say you have no need to see, but want to keep, the content in column ‘F’. To ‘hide’ column ‘F’, right click Excel’s ‘F’ cell and select ‘Hide’. The content would then look like this.

Hiding a row

Let’s say you have no need to see, but want to keep, the content in row ‘3’. To ‘hide’ row ‘3’, right click Excel’s ‘3’ cell and select ‘Hide’.

Hiding select cells

1. Let’s say you have no need to see, but want to keep, the last three words in the sentence about frogs.
2. Highlight the cells that you want to hide.
3. Right click the mouse and select ‘Format Cells…'
4. Select ‘Custom’ on the ‘Number’ tab.
5. Type in three semicolons (;;;) in the ‘Type’ field