The short answer: to unhide columns in Excel, select the columns on either side of the gap, right-click the selection and choose Unhide. To unhide every hidden column at once, press Ctrl+A to select the whole sheet, then go to Home, Format, Hide and Unhide, Unhide Columns. Rows work the same way with Unhide Rows.
That covers the ordinary case in about ten seconds. The reason this question gets asked so often is the rest of it: column A will not come back that way, the keyboard shortcut is broken on most Windows machines, and half the time the rows you think are hidden are not hidden at all. This guide covers the normal method first, then every reason Unhide does nothing, in the order they actually happen.
How do you unhide columns in Excel?
Select the column headers on both sides of the hidden ones, right-click anywhere in that selection, and choose Unhide. If columns D and E are hidden, click the C header, drag to F, right-click, Unhide. Excel restores every hidden column inside the selection. The same three steps work for rows using the row numbers on the left.
Excel gives you a visual clue that something is hidden: the line between two column headers becomes a double line instead of a single one, and the letters skip. If you see A, B, C, F, G, then D and E are hidden. Microsoft documents a faster gesture for that double line too. Double-click directly on it and the hidden columns reappear without opening a menu. It takes a steady hand on a small screen, but it is the quickest way when only one column is missing.
If you prefer the ribbon, select the columns, then Home, Format (in the Cells group), Hide and Unhide, Unhide Columns. Nothing about the ribbon path is better, but it is the one that keeps working when the right-click menu is unavailable, and it is the path you need for the column A problem below.
How do I unhide columns in Excel all at once?
Press Ctrl+A to select every cell, or click the small triangle above row 1 and left of column A. Then go to Home, Format, Hide and Unhide, Unhide Columns. Every hidden column on the sheet comes back in one action. Repeat with Unhide Rows for rows. This is the fastest fix when you inherited a workbook and have no idea what is hidden.
One warning worth taking seriously before you do this on someone else's file. Columns get hidden for a reason more often than people expect: a helper calculation, a cost column the sales team is not supposed to see, an internal margin. Unhiding everything on a shared workbook exposes all of it at once. If the sheet came from another department, unhide, look, and hide again rather than saving over the original.
How to unhide column A in Excel
Column A cannot be unhidden by the normal method because there is no column to its left to include in the selection. Type A1 into the Name Box, the small field to the left of the formula bar, and press Enter. That puts the cursor inside the hidden column. Then use Home, Format, Hide and Unhide, Unhide Columns.
Row 1 has exactly the same problem and exactly the same fix: Name Box, type A1, Enter, then Unhide Rows. Microsoft documents this approach on its own support page for unhiding the first column or row, and it is worth committing to memory because nothing else in the interface hints at it.
There is a second route if you find the Name Box fiddly. Go to Home, Find and Select, Go To, type A1 in the Reference field and click OK. It lands in the same place. Some people also drag-select from the corner triangle rightward past column B and then use Unhide, which works but is easy to get wrong on a trackpad.
What is the shortcut to unhide columns in Excel?
Ctrl+Shift+0 unhides columns and Ctrl+Shift+9 unhides rows. The row shortcut is reliable. The column one fails on a large share of Windows machines because Windows itself claims Ctrl+Shift for switching keyboard layouts and swallows the keypress before Excel ever sees it.
Two other conditions catch people out even when Windows is not interfering. The hidden columns have to be inside the current selection, so select C through F before pressing it, not just column C. And the 0 has to be the one on the main number row. The numeric keypad zero does not trigger it.
If you want the shortcut back, open Settings, Time and Language, Language and region, then Advanced keyboard settings, Input language hot keys. Select "Between input languages", click Change Key Sequence, and set Switch Keyboard Layout to Not Assigned. That is a change to a Windows setting rather than an Excel one, so on a managed corporate laptop it may be locked. On those machines the ribbon path is the practical answer.
| Action | Shortcut | Reliability |
|---|---|---|
| Hide columns | Ctrl+0 | Works consistently |
| Hide rows | Ctrl+9 | Works consistently |
| Unhide rows | Ctrl+Shift+9 | Works consistently |
| Unhide columns | Ctrl+Shift+0 | Often blocked by the Windows language switcher |
How to unhide rows in Excel
Select the row numbers above and below the gap, right-click, and choose Unhide. If rows 12 to 18 are missing, click row 11, drag to row 19, right-click, Unhide. For row 1, use the Name Box trick: type A1, press Enter, then Home, Format, Hide and Unhide, Unhide Rows.
Rows have one complication columns do not, and it accounts for most of the confusion in this whole topic. Rows disappear from view for three different reasons and only one of them is called hiding. That distinction is the subject of the next section.
Why won't my columns unhide in Excel?
Six causes account for nearly all of it: the sheet is protected, the rows are filtered rather than hidden, the range is grouped in an outline, the column has a tiny nonzero width instead of zero, the panes are frozen so the columns are scrolled out of sight, or you are looking at column A and using the wrong method.
| Symptom | Cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Unhide is greyed out in the menu | The worksheet is protected | Review, Unprotect Sheet, then unhide |
| Row numbers skip and turn blue, Unhide does nothing | A filter is hiding the rows, not the hide command | Data, Clear, or click the filter arrow and select all |
| Small plus or minus buttons appear above the headers | Rows or columns are grouped in an outline | Click the plus, or Data, Ungroup, Clear Outline |
| Unhide runs but the column stays invisible | Width is very small but not zero | Right-click the header, Column Width, type 8.43 |
| The first columns are missing and A1 exists | Frozen panes are scrolled past them | View, Freeze Panes, Unfreeze Panes, then Ctrl+Home |
| Every column works except A | Nothing sits to the left to select | Name Box, type A1, Enter, then Unhide Columns |
The filter one deserves emphasis because it is the single most common. Excel's Unhide command only reverses the Hide command. Rows removed by a filter are a different mechanism entirely, and no amount of right-clicking will bring them back. The giveaway is the row numbers: filtered rows leave the remaining numbers coloured blue, and the filter icon on the column header changes to a small funnel. Clear the filter and everything returns. Our guide on how to filter data in Excel covers what each filter state looks like.
The nonzero width case is the one that makes people think Excel is broken. Hiding a column sets its width to zero. But if someone dragged the boundary until the column was a hairline rather than gone, Excel considers it visible, so Unhide has nothing to do. Select the columns either side, right-click, choose Column Width, and type 8.43, which is the default. Everything in the range snaps back to a readable width.
Why is Unhide greyed out in Excel?
A greyed out Unhide almost always means the worksheet is protected. Go to the Review tab and click Unprotect Sheet. If it asks for a password you do not have, you need whoever created the file. Protection is designed to stop exactly this, so there is no in-app workaround, and treating that as a puzzle to solve is usually the wrong instinct.
Whoever protected the sheet may have deliberately allowed some actions and not others. When you set protection up yourself, the dialog has checkboxes for Format Columns and Format Rows, and leaving those unchecked is what disables Unhide for everyone else. If you want colleagues to be able to reveal columns but not edit formulas, tick those two boxes. There is more on the options in our guide to protecting a sheet in Excel.
How to unhide columns in Excel on Mac
The steps are identical. Select the columns on both sides of the gap, control-click or right-click, and choose Unhide, or use Home, Format, Hide and Unhide, Unhide Columns. The Mac keyboard shortcuts are Command+Shift+0 for columns and Command+Shift+9 for rows, and unlike on Windows they are rarely intercepted.
Older versions of macOS did assign Command+Shift+0 to a system input source shortcut, so if nothing happens, check System Settings, Keyboard, Keyboard Shortcuts, Input Sources. Beyond that the behaviour matches Windows, including the column A quirk and the Name Box fix.
Can you unhide columns in Excel for the web?
Yes. Excel for the web supports hiding and unhiding through the same right-click menu and through Home, Format, Hide and Unhide. Select the columns either side of the gap and choose Unhide Columns. Grouping and outlines are also honoured, so a plus button in the margin still expands the way it does in the desktop app.
The browser version is stricter about protected sheets and does not offer the full set of protection options, so a file locked down in the desktop app may simply refuse in the browser. If you hit that, open the file in desktop Excel instead of fighting it.
Hidden columns after a PDF conversion
Converted spreadsheets bring their own version of this problem. A PDF has no concept of a column, only characters positioned on a page, so a converter has to infer where the boundaries are. When a layout has a narrow gutter or a vertical rule, that inference sometimes produces a sliver of a column between two real ones: not hidden, just a fraction of a character wide. It looks like a hidden column, Unhide does nothing, and the fix is the column width one above.
The other pattern is deliberate. When you clean up a converted sheet you often add a helper column to test something, for example whether the amounts arrived as real numbers rather than text, then hide it rather than delete it in case you need it again. Knowing how to bring those back a week later is the whole reason this shortcut is worth learning. Our walkthrough on cleaning up data in Excel after a PDF conversion goes through that sequence in order, and if the numbers came through as text, converting text to numbers is usually the next step.
Worth knowing before you send the file anywhere: hidden is not deleted. A hidden column is still in the workbook, still readable by anyone who unhides it, and still present in the raw file. If a column contains something the recipient should not see, delete it and save a copy rather than hiding it. The same applies further down the chain, where a cleaned export becomes the basis for board ready financial statements that circulate well outside the team that built the spreadsheet.
Do hidden columns still print?
No. Hidden rows and columns are excluded from printing, which is one of the more useful side effects of hiding rather than deleting. Hide the working columns, print the clean version, then unhide. There is no separate print setting to configure, and Print Preview shows exactly what will come out.
Hidden data is also excluded from a chart by default, which surprises people who hide a column and watch a series vanish. You can change that in Select Data, Hidden and Empty Cells, by ticking "Show data in hidden rows and columns". For layout questions around what actually lands on the page, see our guide on printing an Excel spreadsheet.
Do hidden rows and columns affect formulas?
Most functions ignore visibility entirely. SUM, AVERAGE and COUNT include hidden rows in their result, which is correct behaviour but catches people out when a total does not match what they can see. SUBTOTAL and AGGREGATE are the exceptions and can be told to skip hidden rows.
SUBTOTAL with function number 9 sums everything in the range including hidden rows, while 109 sums only visible ones. AGGREGATE gives finer control over what to ignore, including errors. If your total disagrees with the rows on screen, that difference is almost always the reason. Our guide to using SUBTOTAL in Excel covers which number does what.
A quick routine when a sheet looks wrong
When a workbook arrives with missing columns and you have no idea why, run these five checks in order rather than guessing. It takes under a minute and covers every cause above.
- Look at the headers. Skipped letters and a double line mean genuinely hidden columns. Select either side and Unhide.
- Look at the row numbers. Blue numbers and a funnel icon mean a filter. Clear it from the Data tab.
- Look at the margins. Plus or minus buttons mean an outline. Click the plus, or clear the outline from the Data tab.
- Check the Review tab. If it says Unprotect Sheet, the sheet is protected and that is why Unhide is greyed out.
- Select everything with Ctrl+A, set Column Width to 8.43 and Row Height to 15. That resolves any hairline column or row that Unhide will not touch.
If the sheet came out of a converter and the column boundaries are wrong in the first place rather than merely hidden, the problem is upstream of Excel. It is worth re-running the source document through a converter that rebuilds table structure properly, so you start from columns that were correct rather than repairing them by hand. You can convert a PDF to Excel at the top of this page and compare the two outputs side by side.