I’m about to circulate a workbook to quite a few people, and I only want them to look at one sheet. However, to avoid confusion/panic, I don’t want to hide the other sheets as they’ll think they’ve been lost.

Is there any way of locking the sheets so that they appear on theab list at the bottom, but they can’t be selected/opened?

Protect the worksheet with “Select locked cells” unchecked.

I’m looking at ’07 – it’s in the Review tab on the ribbon

You can still see the sheet that way though, you just can’t do anything on it. I don’t want them to be able to see the sheet at all, just the tab.

Hide all the rows in each tab so it’s just blank, then lock.

HTH

Then they’ll be able to see a sheet that looks empty, which will freak them out just as much.

Senior management then 😀

Hide all the rows, apart from one which says:

Nothing
to
see
here

delete the contents of the rest and rename those tabs “deliberately removed”, with a pop-up saying “nosey ****” when they try to open them

Circulate the spreadsheet with the tabs hidden, but tell your colleagues that the other tabs are there but hidden for security/clarity etc?

Delete all the data on the other tabs apart from one cell saying “data redacted” or some such.

I think if it were me I’d just copy the info they’re allowed to access into a fresh file.

Write a VBA Macro which stops them selecting another sheet and pops up a message box such as:

[url=https://flic.kr/p/nagFjf]You are not cleared..[/url] by brf, on Flickr

Here’s a really simple Macro for you:

[url=https://flic.kr/p/nagUVo]Oh no you don’t![/url] by brf, on Flickr

If you change the order round eg

Worksheet1.activate
msgbox(“blah”)

It will swap back instantly and then chastise them….

Footflaps – if it were me on the receiving end of that Macro I’d be straight on the case to get round it to see what juicy info is being hidden. It’s like when you get an outlook recall notice, the first thing you do is read the email to see why it needs to be recalled!

OP – Footflaps solution is neat but it requires the user to have activated macros on the workbook. Your comportate security settings may control this but by default the user has to accept to activate macros and the way the noticifcatino works from 2007 onwards means they are more likely not to activate the macro unless they need to.

I don’t think it’s possible to do what you want without coming up with some darstartdly way to force them to activate Macros.

Printscreen the spreadsheet as a pdf.
They will see the data you send them and all the tabs you have for the other sheet.

Cheers all. I went for the “sod it, I’ll split it into separate workbooks” option.

I don’t think it’s possible to do what you want without coming up with some darstartdly way to force them to activate Macros.

Quite easy to over ride this and take control of Excel. I bind all my .xslm in a .exe wrapper which over rides all the user settings and gives me total control of Office.

If you’re interested I can highly recommend LockXLS: http://www.lockxls.com/product.asp