Display Multiple Excel Worksheet Tabs

Q. Some of my Excel spreadsheets contain many worksheets—up to 36 in some cases. But not all the worksheet tabs show at the bottom of the screen. Is there some way to make more tabs visible, such as displaying multiple rows?

A. Multiple rows would be a good idea, but unfortunately Microsoft hasn’t come up with that solution. There are three things you can do. The first is to slide the divider bar, which is on the bottom of the screen between the tabs and the horizontal scroll bar, all the way to the right; that opens up a bit more space for the tabs.

The second option is to shorten the names on the tabs; that will allow more to show at the bottom of the screen. Notice in the screenshot above how little space the number 2 takes compared with Sheet11 . But of course, no matter how short you make a tab name, you still can’t fit 36 in the space at the bottom of the screen.

The third option is to change how the tabs are displayed. Right-clicking on the controls to the left of the tabs produces a vertical list of all the worksheets in the spreadsheet (see screenshot at below).

If the sheet you want still is not visible, click on More Sheets at the bottom of the list. That launches the Activate dialog box (see below). Click on any of the sheet names to call it to the screen. By the way, Excel can handle as many as 255 worksheets per spreadsheet.