This article documents the typical steps needed to locate Microsoft Excel’s “Hide Sheet” command in the event that the highly intuitive ribbon interface fails you.
First on a PC (Office 2010), then on a Mac (Office for Mac 2011).
On a PC
Enter Help, and search for what you want: ”hide sheet”.
Nothing obvious. How about “hide worksheet”?
Okay then. Maybe “hide tab”?
To Google. . .
Looks promising. . . “hide sheets in excel 2010″ is probably what we want.
Bingo. Top hit. Thank you, Howtogeek.com:
Silly me. I shoulda known “hide sheet” is a visibility feature, which is logically a formatting concept that anyone with any common sense would plant on the ribbon’s Home tab.
On a Mac
Back to work.
{ 14 comments… read them below or add one }
Great illustration!
Right-clicking on a tab will also hide the worksheet. You can bring it back by right-clicking on another tab and selecting “unhide”. All hail the right click!
Am I the only one who finds it absolutely hilarious that Office for a Mac is easier to use and better designed than Office for Windows?
I couldn’t agree more. I would love to see what Microsoft’s Mac development team could do if Redmond really cut them loose.
You are so right. Having worked with them before being laid off just imagine the possibilities. Alas knowing how MS thinks the best you can hope for is that they don’t shred office for Mac altogether.
I have Office on Windows and on Mac.
Easier to use on Mac but everyday it comes with updates …
At the end, I spend more times updating my Mac Office version than using it!
I love it! All this time I thought it was me. Now I understand nobody can find answers in Microsoft help.
Next time someone asks why I switched to Apple I’ll give them a link to this post.
This is great. I was about to give you a little bit of a hard time for not expanding the window a little further when you took the Excel screenshot, so that you could have the pointer on the left rather than covering up the “Sheet” item.
Then I tried it, and realized that the big blue pointer is actually part of the help process itself, and even wriggles around just enough to grab your attention, but not enough to make you want to hurl something through the screen the way that Clippy did.
Pretty impressive stuff.
I have been using Excel for 15 years at least. I am still amazed as to how useless the help feature is. In fact, none of the Office for PC products have help that is worth much. It is good to see that the Mac version has better help.
Actually @Michael that’s the built-in Mac help you get the same searching of menu items etc in all Mac apps.
So, to summarise: Whether you’re using a PC or a Mac, in order to hide a sheet in Excel you should go to the main screen of the application (“Home” in PC, or the top bar on a Mac), click the “Formatting” menu (in BOTH versions), then go to one very clearly labelled sub-menu and click hide?
And regarding searching the help files… I tried that search in MS Excel 07:
http://imgur.com/RCP1K
Second hit in the first search. Just sayin’.
I’ve found that Google beats MS Office Help on a PC every time – the MS Office Help is a complete waste of time and should be scrapped, it wastes a lot more of people’s time than it saves. Try searching for ‘paste unformatted text’ in MS Word 2007 on a PC, and you get stuff about graphics, animation, smartart but nothing about pasting unformatted text.
@Nick, the point is not that the feature is equally accessible on MAC and PC, but that the Help on MAC (or Google!) is so much better
“Silly me. I shoulda known “hide sheet” is a visibility feature, which is logically a formatting concept that anyone with any common sense would plant on the ribbon’s Home tab.”
… in the Cells group.
I am fortunate to be using Word 2010, and when I search for “Paste unformatted text” as you suggest Sipasblog, it returns a whole page of articles on the subject, almost all of them from sites on the internet that have useful tips and tricks and instruction on how to use Word, the same stuff you find with Google no doubt. There is a rich set of answers for that query in Word’s online help. In my original post, I only intended to say that one can’t very well compare the “offline” help of a 4 year old application to the “online” search of a portal that last indexed the web, umm, yesterday? And the “irony” is that someone who lives in the stream and writes of little else should have known that was an unfair comparison to make, and thus it is also a little sad.