How to hide a column in Word

You can hide a table column in Word, all it takes is a little trickery and ignoring Microsoft’s advice!

Sometimes you want to hide a table column in a Word document but according to Microsoft you can’t do it. Here’s how to do it anyway.

It’s true that there’s no explicit ‘hide column’ option like in Excel but you can fake it in various ways. Here’s the example table we’ll use. We want to have the list in order of stepping on the moon but not display the order column.

You might think that the ‘Hidden’ formatting option (Font | Effects | Hidden) would do the trick but that only works for the contents of table cells, not the cells or column.

But the Hidden attribute gets you part way there. To finish the job, change the cell formatting to remove the vertical internal column border. That makes each row look like a single cell, when it’s really two cells with no visible divider.

Finally, narrow the columns and you have what looks like a single column table.

To prove we didn’t cheat, here’s the same table showing the column separator and the columns in the ruler.

Narrowing the column might require using a small font size.

See Also

• Two ways for sorting by Number
• Sort by hidden column in Word
• Sorting in Word
• Alphabetical order in Word