Easy Value Hiding

Summary: Custom formats are a powerful (and often underused) feature of Excel. You can even create a custom format, described in this tip, that allows you to hide the information in a cell. (This tip works with Microsoft Excel 97, Excel 2000, Excel 2002, and Excel 2003.)

Excel provides many different ways to hide the content of your workbooks. Perhaps one of the easiest (and most novel) ways is to use the custom formatting feature of the program. Follow these steps:

Select the cells whose content you want to hide.
Choose Cells from the Format menu. Excel displays the Format Cells dialog box.
Make sure the Number tab is displayed. (Click here to see a related figure.)
In the list of format categories, select Custom.
In the Type box, enter three semicolons (;;;).
Click on OK.

Now the information in the cell is not visible, nor will it print. You can, however, see the information in the Formula Bar, and it can be overwritten if you enter anything else in the cell.

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (2939) applies to Microsoft Excel versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003

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Easy Value Hiding