Hidden Columns List
Nik Fuentes
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I would love to have a collapsable/expandable list of all hidden columns on a sheet with the option to unhide them from the list. This way, if I have multiple hidden columns and I just want one or two of them, I don't have to unhide everything to get to them. This would also allow you to look for columns that might be hidden without unhiding everything and needing to re-hide it again.
I know that you can unhide one column at a time, but if I have a block of 8 hidden columns and I want the 4th one, I either unhide all 8, or manually unhide 4 one at a time. Neither is ideal.
Comments
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Current functionality to hide and unhide columns is not very efficient. Suggesting a better interface to show/hide columns just like Smartsheet has in Reports to select columns to be displayed. See below,
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Totally agree! When the sheets become longer with a lot of information, it does get difficult to unhide all the columns and then go hide them one by one.
Regards
Sowmya Venugopal
CI Analyst II, Niagara Bottling
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If columns could have a 'Hidden' attribute in their column properties like in Forms, then we could have a 'Hide Columns' option in the right-click column menu, instead of only 'Show All Hidden Column' and then no efficient way of re-hiding them all.
Also, some way to distinguish these 'Hidden' columns when they are made visible, by allowing some form of user-selected (conditional?) formatting within the sheet would also be informative/useful.
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I agree with Adrian on this. We need not to show hidden columns in forms.
I also would like to see all of what is being proposed in this idea implemented.
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Related - It would be nice to hide/reveal hidden columns in the field picklist when creating a sheet filter
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The system allows users to hide columns individually or in blocks - good. Unhiding those columns - bad. There are currently only two alternatives to unhiding columns - unhide all, which is ridiculous overkill that requires users to then unhide all the unwanted columns, or unhiding them one at a time by dragging the vertical column separator. This second option is inefficient in that it's one-at-a-time, and undesirable in that unhiding is a manual drag that does not preserve the previous column width. There should be an option to select a block of columns and unhide all columns in that range at the previously saved column widths.
Like functionality should also exist for hiding rows.
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For example, in the edit box when you edit a row, add a column with a checkbox where you can hide and unhide any column in the sheet, something like this:
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Perhaps not exactly what you are looking for, but a handy trick I recently learned from a colleague relative to your second point; give the columns you want typically hidden a gray (or some other) background color. That way, when you unhide all, it's easy(er) to hide them again without having to (again) think through whether each column should be hidden. This is something I now do on every sheet I create and it is super helpful.
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That's an interesting way to manage it. I current use gray for columns that have automations attached to them, meaning "don't fill this out, it will be filled out automatically". I use other colors to mean other things; having a color assigned to typically-hidden rows is definitely something to consider.
I can see this potentially getting a little confusing if you move rows from sheet to sheet (like I do - I have 1 workflow sheet per phase of our workflow, so rows move from workflow to workflow and take all their columns with them as they go). I also copy rows to sub-sheets to track more specific items.
A column that was hidden in one sheet may not want to be hidden in another sheet. This may only require an initial fix, though, so maybe not that big of a deal.
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I like the idea of using to indicate automations will populate. Thanks for sharing. What I had been doing similarly was highlighting fields a certain color relative to the group that is expected to populate them. Ie. project team input vs. PM. That said, I like to limit the amount of colors on my sheets...I think it was a Smartsheet webinar that made me aware of how this can result in something I think they called a clown sheet....too many colors, degrading the effectiveness of any of the colors.
To solve the challenge you note, I would try using conditional formatting. First, on the source sheet I'd set the column colors instead of setting it manually to check whether formatting set conditionally carries over to the new sheet. If it does, set new conditional formatting on the destination sheet.
