Moving Worksheet Tabs to a Different Place

By default, Excel places the worksheet tabs just below the worksheet and above the status bar. Benny wonders if it is possible to move the tabs to a different side of the worksheet. If he was able to move them to the left or right side, he believes he could see more of them at once.

There is no setting within Excel to indicate where tabs should appear, nor can you drag the tabs area to a different side of the program window. That being said, there are some things you can try.

First, you can use the Navigation pane. Display the View tab of the ribbon and click on the Navigation tool, and the pane appears at the right side of the screen. It defaults to showing all the worksheets in the workbook, but you can expand any worksheet in the pane to display elements of that worksheet.

Further, you can reposition the Navigation pane by hovering the mouse pointer over the top border, just to the right of the title "Navigation." The pointer turns into a four-headed arrow, at which point you can click and drag the Navigation pane to where you prefer it be located.

There are also third-party add-ins for Excel that can provide horizontal worksheet navigation lists. You can find such add-ins through an Internet search, or you can check out these:

• Kutools: https://www.extendoffice.com/product/kutools-for-excel.html
• XLNavigator: https://kudutek.com/xlnavigator/

If the entire purpose of wanting to move the worksheet tabs is to see more tabs on the screen at once, then there are other things you can try (while leaving the tabs at the bottom of the screen). For instance, you can resize or hide the horizontal scroll bar. You can resize it by clicking on the three dots at the left of the scroll bar and drag to the right. You can turn it off by following these steps:

1. Display the Excel Options dialog box. (In Excel 2007 click the Office button and then click Excel Options. In Excel 2010 or a later version, display the File tab of the ribbon and then click Options.)
2. Click the Advanced option at the left of the dialog box.
3. Scroll through the available options until you find the "Display Options for this Workbook" section. (See Figure 1.)



Figure 1. The Advanced options of the Excel Options dialog box.

4. Clear the Show Horizontal Scroll Bar check box.
5. Click OK.

To display even more worksheet tabs, consider renaming your worksheets with shorter names. Excel will adjust the size of the tabs according to the length of the worksheet names and the number of worksheets in the workbook. The shorter the names, the more tabs you can see.

Finally, notice that to the left of the worksheet tabs there is a < and a > character. Hover the mouse over these and you can see that you can use the arrows for navigation. Right-clicking on either arrow displays a list of worksheets in a dialog box, allowing you to easily jump to the one you want.

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (10622) applies to Microsoft Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, 2024, and Excel in Microsoft 365.