As you work in Excel, you may find yourself with zeroes inside your data. Sometimes, it’s useful to display these zeros, but frequently you might want to hide them. Fortunately, Excel offers easy ways to hide zero values right inside your data. Let’s learn how to hide zeroes in Microsoft Excel.
How to Hide Zeroes in Excel
Imagine that you have several rows and columns containing data. You want to focus only on values greater than zero, and the easiest way to do that is to hide zero values. Keep in mind, hiding values isn’t the same as deleting them. Zero values won’t be visible, but they won’t be erased either.
To hide zeroes in Excel, begin by going to the Excel dropdown. You’ll find this in the upper left corner of your screen. On the dropdown menu, you’ll see an array of options. The one you’re looking for is Preferences. Go ahead and click on it.
Excel will open the Excel Preferences menu, from which you can choose from a variety of additional tabs. In the Authoring section, click on View.
On the View menu, under Show in Workbook, notice the Zero Values checkbox. By default, it will be checked in Excel. To hide zeroes, simply click once, and the box will be unchecked.
Once you’ve done this, you can close out the Preferences menu. Any zero values present in your workbook will disappear. Notice that the cells appear blank, but the values are still maintained. To demonstrate, you can click into a newly blank cell, and note the numerical zero value in the Formula bar.
As you can see, it’s easy to hide zeroes in Microsoft Excel. This is a fast and easy way to declutter your data, focusing on numbers with positive values. Try it next time you need to analyze large volumes of data in Excel.