Automatically Hiding the Personal Workbook

Ken is having a problem with his Personal.xlsb workbook. When he needs to work on it, he unhides it. If he forgets to hide it again when he is done, then the next time he starts Excel the Personal.xlsb workbook is immediately visible. Since it looks like a new, blank worksheet, he often starts typing in it and this messes up his Personal.xlsb workbook. He wonders if there is a way to automatically force Personal.xlsb to be hidden if he forgets to hide it manually.

There are a couple of things you need to keep in mind. First, if you are only making changes to macros in Personal.xlsb, you may not need to unhide the workbook to work on those macros. In some versions of Excel you can display the VBA editor and use the object browser to make sure you are working on the macros in the Personal.xlsb workbook. When you are done editing the macros, you can save them without ever needing to make the workbook visible.

If that approach doesn't work for you or, perhaps, you have some other reason to make Personal.xlsb visible, then you could make some sort of editing change to the first worksheet in the workbook. For instance, place the text "THIS IS PERSONAL" into cell A1 of the workbook. Do something to make it stand out (large, bold, colors, etc.), and you will never again miss that you are working in the Personal workbook when you first start Excel.

If you want a macro approach to make sure that the workbook is hidden, then you could add the following code to the ThisWorkbook object for Personal.xlsb:

Private Sub Workbook_BeforeClose(Cancel As Boolean)
    Windows("PERSONAL.XLSB").Visible = False
    ThisWorkbook.Save
End Sub

The macro is executed just before the workbook is closed (which happens when Excel is exited). It hides the workbook and then saves it. That way, the next time you start Excel, Personal.xlsb will be automatically hidden.

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (12159) applies to Microsoft Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, Excel in Microsoft 365, and 2021. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Excel here: Automatically Hiding the Personal Workbook.