At the bottom of every Microsoft Excel workbook, you will find the sheet tabs (e.g., Sheet1, Sheet2, Data, Dashboard). These tabs allow you to easily navigate between different pages of your spreadsheet. However, if you are building an interactive dashboard for a client or creating a strict data-entry form for your employees, you might not want users clicking around into the raw data tabs or breaking your carefully constructed formulas. To create a cleaner, software-like experience and restrict navigation, you can hide the sheet tabs completely.
How to Hide the Sheet Tabs
Hiding the tabs is a workbook-level setting. It will hide the tabs for the specific file you are currently working on, but will not affect other Excel files on your computer.
- Open your specific workbook in Microsoft Excel.
- Click on the File tab located in the top-left corner of the window.
- Look at the bottom of the left-hand blue sidebar and click on Options. (You may need to click ‘More…’ first to reveal Options).
- The “Excel Options” dialogue box will appear. In the left-hand menu pane, click on Advanced.
- Scroll a little more than halfway down the long list of settings until you find the section titled Display options for this workbook:.
- Directly beneath that heading, you will see a checkbox labelled Show sheet tabs.
- Click the checkbox to uncheck it.
- Click the OK button at the bottom right of the window.
How to Navigate Without Tabs
Once you click OK, the tabs at the bottom of the screen will instantly vanish. But how do you navigate the workbook now?
If you are the developer, you can still switch between hidden sheets using the keyboard shortcuts Ctrl + Page Down and Ctrl + Page Up.
For your end-users, you will need to build navigation directly into the spreadsheet itself. You can do this by inserting shapes or buttons, right-clicking them, and selecting Link (or Hyperlink) to create clickable buttons that jump to specific cells on the other, now-hidden sheets.