If you retrieve an Excel file with a hidden window, quite simply it won’t work. To unhide the window: Go to “View” then click “Unhide” To toggle into the hidden window: Press “Ctrl + F4”, then In case you, (like we were), are going loopy at midnight trying to fix this issue, I’m going to to give you the answer upfront and then a series of screenshots to show you where to find the different keys.
The good news is that when you know what’s going on, it only takes a few keystrokes to access the hidden window and to close it. None of the answers posted looked particularly attractive to us, as they suggested doing radical things like changing the registry of the computer. We found lots of forums across the web filled with users who had similar problems. However, even after we had worked out that we had accidentally hidden a window, we couldn’t find instructions within “Microsoft Help” to assist us to either access or close the hidden window. We considered many possibilities to explain the strange behaviour of the file, including the possibility that we might have a virus.
How to unhide a column in excel in windows update#
In December 2012, we hit upon this problem, and months of work on an Excel spreadsheet were put in jeopardy as we could not update the file. The problem is that if you save a file with one or more windows accidentally hidden, you’re going to have a file that behaves very strangely indeed and gives you a lot of grief. In other words, you can hide a window, but not be aware that you have done it. It is far too easy to accidentally hide a window, because the “hide” button is placed right beside the “split” button, which you would more commonly use to split your screen. MS Excel also allows you to hide a window, which is a function that probably has very limited use. Microsoft Excel, (both 20 versions), allows you to work with multiple windows open within one spreadsheet file.