When you’re dealing with a data-heavy spreadsheet, sometimes it can be helpful to hide some unimportant columns to reduce distractions and get a better view of important data.
Fortunately, Google Sheets make it easy to do this.
In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to hide and unhide columns in Google Sheets.
Ready? Let’s get started…
01. How to Hide Columns in Google Sheets?
Let’s say we have a simple table containing Student’s Name, Registration ID, Gender, Age, Date, and Class.
Here we want to hide the Gender column from our view.
Here’s how we can do so…
- Select a column (or columns) you want to hide. To do this, simply click on the column heading letter (A, B, C, D…..) appearing at the top.
- Right click on the selected column and select Hide column option from the context menu that appears.
That’s it… Your selected columns will get hidden and you’ll see arrows next to the two columns before and after the hidden columns.
02. Hide Columns in Google Sheets With Shortcut
What if I tell you there is a quick keyboard shortcut to hide columns in Google Sheets?
Yes, if you’re a keyboard person like me then just select a column (or columns) and follow the shortcut given below:
Hold the CTRL + ALT keys and then press 0 (zero) on your keyboard.
This will hide the selected column.
03. Hide Columns in Google Sheets Application
If you are using Google Sheets on your smartphone, you can hide columns there as well.
Here are the exact steps you need to follow to hide columns in Google Sheets Android, as well as the iOS app.
- Open the worksheet in which you want to hide the column.
- Select the column you wish to hide. To select multiple column, simply drag the little blue dots appearing at the both side of the selected column.
- Tap anywhere within the shaded area of the selected column, it will bring up a few options such as cut, copy, Auto-fill, etc. Tap on the three vertical dots appearing at the right of the menu.
- Select Hide columns option that appears in the pop-up menu.
04. How to Unhide Column in Google Sheets?
When you hide a column (or columns), an arrow (caret icons) appears on the border between the two columns before and after the hidden columns.
The quickest way to unhide columns in Google Sheets is to click on one of the two arrows and it will show all the hidden columns between that specific arrow.
05. Unhide Column in Google Sheets – Large Datset
The above method is great if you have a few hidden columns and you can spot where columns are hidden in your spreadsheet.
But, what if you receive a large spreadsheet from your co-worker and it has hundreds of hidden columns here and there.
Don’t worry…
In that case, you can unhide all the hidden columns within 1 click without even manually spotting them.
Here is how:
- First, select the range of column which may have hidden column in between. To select all the column in your sheet, click on the first column and then press and hold the Shift key and select the last column. It will select all the column in your spreadsheet.
- Right-click anywhere and select “unhide columns” from the context menu that appears.
That’s it… It will unhide all the rows between the selected columns…
POPULAR GUIDES ON SPREADSTACK
- How to Split One Column into Multiple Columns in Google Sheets (Split one column into multiple column to make the data easier to skim through and work with)
- How to Give a Name to the Columns in Google Sheets (Here’s how to create custom column names if you don’t want to use the default column headings)
06. Final Thoughts:
When it comes to working on a large dataset, you often need to compare specific columns with each other.
If the distance between these columns is too much, it can be irritating at times to scroll right & left every time to read the data.
Once you learn how to hide columns in Google Sheets, it will be much easier to read, compare and analyze important columns without too much scrolling in the spreadsheet.
Over to you: Do you find this Google Sheets tutorial helpful? Let me know in the comment section.
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