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How to unhide row 1 and column A in an Excel sheet

Unhiding column A or row 1 is no different from unhiding other rows.
Just click on B or 2 and drag to the left or up respectively. Keeping the cursor in the highlighted row or column (a 2R or 2C will show), right click, select unhide.

I once overused cell hiding to make a report look nice. I wanted it to show only the print area. It looked like a professional report. Something very strange occurred at some point and I am only left with my speculation of what it could be. At first I noticed that the document was very slow. Slow to open, slow to scroll, slow to do anything at all really. Then after I saved it was clear that my 2MB report had ballooned to 12MB.

Then I tried to fix it. The columns would unhide but the rows... The rows never came back. I held a little funeral as I explained to my spreadsheet that it was over. I would move whoever was left to a new home in a new spreadsheet and leave this terrible mess behind. It's the least I could do after they lost so many of their uniformly divided brethren.

So what happened? I hid the rows by selecting all the unused rows and I hid the columns by selecting whole columns. Where these two commands intersected I believe a perverse cell hiding orgy took place where each cell was told to hide multiple times in some way that Microsoft never intended. This duplicitous duplication is irreversible. I do not recommend it even though it sure did look nice.

I use custom views extensively so if I hide columns for some reason, I can always revert to "normal" view which has everything displayed. Then I use "X presentation", "Y presentation", "manager review" and several others.

When I get spreadsheets in which Row1, ColA is hidden, I use F5 "go to" that cell, then format the column width to 5 and the row height to 5. I use that because sometimes people don't actually hide the row/column, but instead set the dimensions to zero, in which case unhiding is not useful because it will make them appear in their formatted settings. If that is 0 X 0, there is still more work to do.

Once the cursor is in A1, using F5 or the name box, just use Ctrl + shift + ) to unhide column A, or Ctrl + shift + ( to unhide row 1. (I think they were two of TechRepublic's keyboard shortcuts). They work even though the cursor is hidden.

What about the shurtcuts for the same thnings?
Hide column: Ctrl+0
Show column: Shift+Ctrl+0
Hide row: Ctrl+9
Show row: Shift+Ctrl+9
At least with a danish keyboard
From the Heart

In Excel 2007 you can just hover over the left hand side of column B and right click and click unhide..... The same as you usually would

I have used Excel for many things. What situation would require hiding Col A Row 1?

I find it as easy if not easier to use "group" It will hide the row or column but leaves a convenient "+" character to the side or top you can use to unhide that particular row or column..

If you click in the "Select all" box (left of the column labels and above the row labels, it selects the whold worksheet. then Unhide will unhide A and 1. Of course, it also unhides all other rows and columns, so if that's not what you want, the F5 (GOTO) trick works best.

My solution is just to never hide row 1 or column A. Thanks for the tip in how to unhide them anyway.

I select column B and drag left to include the row numbers ("column" to the left under the Select All icon) - then right click and select Unhide. Works the same for row 1.

In addition to the problem of unhiding column A (which I usually unhide by hovering my cursor over the left border of B until I get the double-sided arrow, then just click and drag to the right to expand the hidden column A) - I've also run across columns or rows being 'hidden' because of how Freeze Panes was applied. If you scroll to the right on a worksheet until column A is no longer visible and then apply freeze panes, then you cannot scroll back to see column A until you unfreeze panes.

I'm thinking this may be version specific, because the first time I encountered this, I had a user who had managed to hide the first column of a report (he knew it was there the last time he used it), and I tried selecting all, and selecting there backwards (to the left), and about three other things that I can no longer remember, and nothing worked. If it wasn't that the data showed up on the printout, we wouldn't have known that he hadn't deleted it.

Eventually, the only thing that worked was to use the GoTo command to get there (A1), and the Unhide command once in the cell.

He might also have had Freeze Panes on, which would have prevented everything else from helping.

the missing header??? Really??? How much time do you have, and how good is your attention to detail?? I've always found that it's better to let the file tell you about hidden columns. For example, I'd key this formula into a cell in column A:

=IF(CELL("width",A1)=0,1,0)

This will result in 1 if the column is hidden. Copy this accross ALL columns (use CTL+SHIFT+RICHTARROW or END, SHIFT+RIGHTARROW to highlight all, then paste). Select the row of formulae by clicking once in the row number, then look at the autostats in the status bar. The SUM stat will tell you how many columns are hidden.

You can quickly narrow down where they are by deleting half the formulae at a time and re-checking the sum stat for changes.

I'm an instructor of MS Office for a local community college and I had a few students get some of their rows (1 through 4 mostly) hidden and could not retrieve them. Neither could I, until I removed the "Freeze Panes" that had been created as a part of the exercise.

Always another gotcha to getcha!