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A quick way to hide data

EXCEL HACKS

A child covering their eyes

There may be times when you want to hide data from your audience

Instead of creating a new work book and deleting the sections you don't want seen, you can use this trick


How to hide data

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Step by Step Instructions

Let say you have the below table of data but you don't yet want to share the June data as it is still provisional, but you also don't want to delete the formulas pulling in the June data

To solve the problem, you can custom format the cell

Select the range of cells you want to hide and press Ctrl 1. The Format Cells box pops us

Select Custom, and replace General under "Type" with three semi-colons [;;;]

Although the data is hidden, it can still be seen in the formula bar

Just take note that this trick is best used when taking screenshots to send to your colleagues or if you are presenting to an audience. If you share an Excel workbook with the data hidden in this way, the user will still be able to see it

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