Hiding worksheets and locking the workbook

If you are planning to share your workbook with other users, you may want to hide all q-sheets and lock the workbook to prevent accidental edits to your query code.

Hiding worksheets

Because our dashboard is self-contained, there is no need for users to see or access the q-sheets or, for that matter, the Dropdowns worksheet we used to hold the values for the drop-downs in our dashboard. It is also a good idea to hide q-sheets to prevent the user from changing the query code.

You can hide a worksheet by right-clicking its tab and then selecting Hide from the context menu:

For our example, we would hide the following worksheets:
  • _1010q Sheet
  • _1010q Sheet (2)
  • _1010q Departments
  • Dropdowns
  • Sheet1
    Note: In fact, you could delete Sheet1 since it is no longer needed.

Once those worksheets are hidden, our workbook looks like:

To unhide worksheets you have previously hidden, right-click anywhere along your worksheets pane at the bottom of your workbook and click Unhide. From the Unhide dialog, you can select which worksheets you would like to be visible again:

Locking the workbook

To prevent users from unhiding worksheets, you can lock the workbook. On the Review tab, click Protect Workbook:

In the Protect Structure and Windows dialog, make sure that Structure is selected:

If you want to require the user to provide a password to unhide worksheets, enter a password in the Password (optional) field.

Click OK for the changes to take effect.
Note: Once the workbook has been locked, you need to click Protect Workbook on the Review tab to be able to make changes to the workbook. If a password is required, you must enter the password in the Unprotect Workbook dialog and click OK

Now your dashboard is ready to send out to others!