How to hide or unhide Excel scroll bar

by | Feb 25, 2020 | Excel Tips & Tricks

excel scroll bar hide unhide

As you might know, Excel displays horizontal and vertical scroll bars to allow scrolling through the horizontal and vertical areas in worksheets. Although, these are essential tools for working in a workbook; you may want to hide them to give your Excel workbook a compact look and feel. This way, you can focus your users into a specific range. You can even tie this functionality to other parameters with the VBA method to give it an even more dynamic style. In this guide, we’re going to show you how to hide or unhide each Excel scroll bar.

You have 2 options to do this - using Excel Options or VBA. Let’s see the steps for each method.

Hide or Unhide Each Excel Scroll Bar Using Excel Options

You can find the corresponding preferences under the Excel Options dialog. Follow the steps to open this dialog and configure based on your needs.

  1. Click the File tab if you are using Excel 2010 or a higher version. Alternatively, click the Office button in Excel 2007.
  2. Click Options to activate the Excel Options
  3. In the Excel Options dialog, activate the Advanced tab
  4. Scroll down to the Display options for this workbook
  5. If there are more than one workbooks open at the same time, make sure that the correct workbook is selected.
  6. Check or uncheck the Show Horizontal Scroll bar option and Show Vertical Scroll bar options based on your preferences.
  7. Click the OK button to apply your changes.

excel scroll bar

Using VBA

A simple VBA code can help you hide or unhide Excel scroll bars with a single click. Another common scenario is to force hide (or show) scroll bars automatically to make the workbook to keep its layout.

Each scroll bar has its own property under the Window object. You need to set these properties to False to hide them. Set them True to show them instead.

ActiveWindow.DisplayHorizontalScrollBar = False ‘hides horizontal scroll bar
ActiveWindow.DisplayHorizontalScrollBar = True ‘unhides horizontal scroll bar
ActiveWindow.DisplayVerticalScrollBar = False ‘hides vertical scroll bar
ActiveWindow.DisplayVerticalScrollBar = True ‘unhides vertical scroll bar