Microsoft Excel Issues - All of My Sheet Tabs Have Disappeared

I've been working with Microsoft Excel for many years. I've written some pretty advanced macros to accomplish things that most people would tell you are impossible. This past week I had a coworker come to me with an Excel problem that I'd never seen before which is really rare.

He said he was working in a workbook that had 8 tabs and now all of them just disappeared. He didn't know where the other sheets went but all of his data is gone. At first I thought that he had deleted it and saved over it but this wasn't the case. Being experienced with where you can see all of the objects in Excel I went into the Excel Visual Basic Editor which will show you all of the sheets in your workbook and any other attached module code that you've added to provide additional functionality. It showed all 8 tabs there. Once I knew that they where there he was really relieved it was just a matter of getting them to show. Knowing VB like I do I created a macro to skip from Sheet 1 to Sheet 2. Now I also knew that programmatically I can move between the tabs.

I then turned to the ultimate data source Google. One search later I found this article on Microsoft's website. It says that there is an option in Excel that you can actually turn off the worksheet tabs.

In Office 2003 to fix this go to Tools > Options

When the window opens it should select the View tab if not click on View

The bottom right checkbox says Sheet Tabs beside it. If this is uncheck click in the box and this will check the box. Click OK and your tabs should now reappear.

Save your file before you do anything else and forget.

In Office 2007 to fix this click on the Office button in the top left corner. Then click on Excel Options. In the advanced category, under display options for this workbook check the show sheet tabs checkbox. If it isn't checked check it and click OK. Save your file before you forget.

Now at first I thought, why would anyone want to do that? Then I started thinking about

all the times I've used a secondary sheet as a data source which I sent out to people that I didn't want to see or edit the other worksheets. This option set programmatically when the sheet opens could be used as a security feature for basic users not to mess with data that they don't need to see. As confusing as it was at the time to find yet another feature of Excel it only proves that you do learn something new everyday.