NOTHING IS UPLOADED — OPEN YOUR NETWORK TAB AND WATCH

Find the sheets
you cannot see

Hiding a sheet is a display setting. It takes one right-click to undo.

Drop a file to see what is inside it

Get a privacy score, a plain-English list of what it gives away, and a clean copy. Read from your disk, never uploaded.

JPEG · PNG · HEIC · WEBP · PDF · DOCX · XLSX · PPTX

What you would actually see

An illustration of a typical result. No real file, name or location is used.

Before — what you would be sending
budget-2026.xlsxXLSX
  • Hidden sheets 2 sheets are hidden from view
  • Last edited by a.whitfield
  • Revision number 47
After cleaning
budget-2026-clean.xlsxXLSX
  • Hidden sheets reported, left for you
  • Last edited by removed
  • Revision number removed
Nothing is deleted. You see what is there and decide what to do about it.

Two kinds of hidden

A normally hidden sheet can be restored by right-clicking any tab and choosing Unhide. A very hidden sheet does not appear in that list and needs the developer tools to restore, which stops a casual reader but nobody who is looking. Neither is protection.

What tends to be on them

The working. Cost bases, supplier rates, margin calculations, the assumptions behind a headline number, staff details, an older version of the model. These get hidden rather than deleted because the visible sheets still depend on them.

The right fix

Build a fresh workbook containing only what the recipient should have, with values pasted in rather than formulas pointing at sheets you removed. Sending a hidden copy of your own working is a habit worth breaking.

In practice

Checking for very hidden sheets

Right-clicking a tab and choosing Unhide shows normally hidden sheets. It does not show very hidden ones, which is the whole reason the setting exists. To see those, open the Visual Basic editor with Alt and F11, look at the Project Explorer, and every sheet in the workbook is listed with its visibility property. Anything set to xlSheetVeryHidden would not have appeared in the Unhide dialog.

Hidden rows and columns are separate

A visible sheet can still be concealing data in hidden rows and columns, which are a different mechanism and appear in no sheet list. Select all with Control or Command and A, then unhide rows and columns from the Format menu. Spreadsheets sent for review routinely have working columns hidden rather than deleted, and they contain the assumptions behind the numbers on display.

Why hiding is used instead of deleting

Almost always because something still depends on it. That dependency is exactly why deleting the sheet before sending breaks the file, and why the honest fix is a fresh workbook with values pasted in rather than a stripped copy of your working file.

Common questions

How do I unhide a hidden sheet in Excel?

Right-click any sheet tab and choose Unhide. Very hidden sheets require the Visual Basic editor.

Is hiding a sheet secure?

No. It is a display setting, not a protection measure.

Will this tool delete hidden sheets for me?

No. It reports them and leaves them intact, because deleting a sheet destroys data.