Excel

How to unhide all sheets in Excel at once

3 minute read

You've inherited a workbook with a dozen tabs, and right-clicking any visible tab and choosing Unhide only ever reveals them one at a time — and sometimes the dialog is empty even though you know there's more in the file. Here's what's going on.

Two different kinds of hidden

Excel actually has two hidden states, and only one of them is reachable from the normal interface:

• Hidden. Right-click any sheet tab → Unhide shows these and lets you bring them back, one at a time.
• Very hidden. This state can only be set (and cleared) through the VBA editor — it doesn't appear in the standard Unhide dialog at all, even though the sheet still exists in the file. It's often used deliberately to hide helper sheets or raw data from casual viewers.

Unhiding normally hidden sheets

1. Right-click any visible sheet tab at the bottom of the window.
2. Choose Unhide…
3. Select a sheet from the list and click OK. Repeat for each one — Excel doesn't offer a "select all" here.

Unhiding "very hidden" sheets

1. Press Alt+F11 to open the VBA editor.
2. In the Project pane on the left, click the sheet you want to unhide.
3. In the Properties pane (usually bottom-left), find the Visible property and change it from 2 - xlSheetVeryHidden to -1 - xlSheetVisible.
4. Repeat for each very-hidden sheet, then close the VBA editor.

This works, but it means opening the VBA editor at all — not something everyone's comfortable doing, and some locked-down corporate environments disable macro editing entirely, which blocks this route completely.

The automatic way

Both hidden states are just a stored attribute per sheet in the workbook's underlying XML, so they can be cleared directly and in one pass — no VBA editor required, and it works even in environments where macros are disabled.