Cell Hide And Seek In MS Excel

Have you ever found yourself trying to hide the contents of a single cell in MS Excel?

What did you do?

Most of us know how to hide a complete column / row – did you put the information in its own column then hide the entire column?

Or did you find yourself putting the information in the “far reaches” of the spread sheet then only printing what you need?

Either way – it’s sort of a pain.

Would you like to know how to hide the contents of an individual cell?

Yes?

Yeah – I thought so. (It’s just another one of those wonderful tidbits of “know how” that just might come in handy later on.)

So – now that we agree it’s a good idea – let’s get down to business.

• To begin with, you’ll need to select the cell with the contents that need to be hidden.
• Next you need to get to the Format Cells window. You can do this either through the Format menu, Cells choice or with Ctrl + 1.
• On the Number tab, in the Category column, you need to select Custom.

  

• Then in the Type field you need to highlight the current selection and type in ;;; (that’s 3 semicolons).

  

• Now click OK or press Enter.

  And that’s it. You should have been returned to your worksheet where you no longer see the contents of the cell. (You might want to notice that you can still see the cell contents in the formula bar – just not in the worksheet.)

  If you ever need to display the cell contents again simply go back into the Format Cells window and select the appropriate category and type for the data then click OK.

  And there you have it. A new solution to the problem of necessary, but not to be displayed, data.

  ~ April