How to hide/Unhide Sheet Tabs in Excel?

By default Excel displays the tabs at left hand side bottom. Using this Users can navigate to any worksheet present in the workbook.

Note: This article is not able hiding sheets. It is only about sheets tabs.

If you chose now to display these navigation Tabs for any reason, try these Manual & VBA techniques.

Option to display or hide Tabs

Open Excel and follow these steps.

  1. File -> Options -> Advanced
  2. Scroll down & find section “Display options for this Workbook”
  3. Uncheck “Show sheet tabs”
  4. Click ok.
Excel Worksheet Show Hide Unhide Tabs
Excel Worksheet Show Hide Unhide Tabs

Now, You can see that the Excel is not displaying the Tabs. To view it again, go to same option and check the same option.

VBA Code to Hide/Unhide Sheet Tabs

This is just a one line code. Set this to True or False to view or hide the Sheet tabs.

Sub ViewSheetTabs()
    'Unhide sheet tabs
    ActiveWindow.DisplayWorkbookTabs = True
End Sub

Sub HideSheetTabs()
    'View Sheet Tabs
    ActiveWindow.DisplayWorkbookTabs = False
End Sub

Press F5 and you will be able to see the changes immediately.

Sheet tabs are hidden for many purposes. Few of them are:

  1. Security purpose. To stop people from viewing all sheets.
  2. Better View: Hiding the tabs gives user single view of the sheet & more viewing area on screen.

And there may be other reason as well.

External Reference: To know more about this topic, you could also view this page.