How to Hide and Colour Tabs in Numbers
About This QuickTip
If your Numbers spreadsheets are a sea of identical tabs, this new update is a game-changer. You can now colour-code your tabs so you can spot the important ones instantly, red for urgent, green for what's next, whatever system works for you. In this guide I'll show you how on iPhone and iPad: tap a tab, press the format brush, open Sheet Options, and pick a Tab Colour. I'll also cover the new Hide Sheet feature, which tidies away tabs you're not using to give you more space, and how to restore them whenever you need them. It's a small change that makes big spreadsheets far easier to navigate. If this helped, hit subscribe for more simple Apple tips.
Step by Step
Tap the tab and press the Format brush
Tap on the tab that you want to change, and then press the Format brush. That's a little paintbrush icon on the top toolbar.
Choose a Tab Colour
Go onto the Sheet Options menu, and then you can choose a Tab Colour, just like picking any other colour in Numbers. You can select the exact colour you want.
Switch between tabs to see the colour
When you're actively on the tab, the whole thing will light up that colour. When you jump to a different tab, it gets a little underlined effect in that colour, so you can quickly see which one is which.
Press Hide Sheet to hide a tab
If you work on a large document but you don't want everything to be visible all the time, press the Hide Sheet button on that same format menu. That tab will then disappear from the top tab bar completely.
Restore hidden tabs with the plus button
Don't panic, it's not gone! If you press the plus button to make a new tab, you're going to have the option to restore ones you've previously hidden and make them visible again.
Good to know
- Hiding a tab isn't deleting it. It's just taking it off of that tab bar to give you more space to work on what's important.
- Colours make it quick to see which tab is red for urgent attention, or which one is green for the next thing you need to look at.
Questions This Answers
How do I change the colour of a tab in Numbers on iPad or iPhone?
Tap on the tab you want to change, press the format brush on the top toolbar, go onto the Sheet Options menu and choose a Tab Colour. You can select the exact colour you want, just like picking any other colour in Numbers.
Can you hide sheets in Numbers?
Yes, with the new update to Numbers you can press the Hide Sheet button on the same format menu. The tab will disappear from the top tab bar completely, but it's not deleted.
How do I unhide a sheet in Numbers?
Press the plus button to make a new tab, and you'll have the option to restore ones you've previously hidden and make them visible again.
Transcript
If you're like me, you've probably got quite a few big Numbers documents on your iPad and iPhone. Especially if you've got lots and lots of tabs, it can get quite tricky to find what you want at a glance. And for a long time, I've wished we could colour coordinate them. Well, we actually can now.
So, all we need to do is tap on the tab that you want to change, and then press the format brush. That's a little paintbrush icon on the top toolbar. From here, go onto the Sheet Options menu, and then you can choose a Tab Colour, just like picking any other colour in Numbers. You can select the exact colour you want.
And when you're actively on the tab, the whole thing will light up that colour. When you jump to a different tab, it gets a little underlined effect in that colour. So again, you can quickly see which one the red is for urgent attention, or which one the green is for the next thing you need to look at.
It's also worth knowing that with this new update to Numbers, we can also hide tabs. So if you work on a large document, but you don't want everything to be visible all the time, you can simply press the Hide Sheet button on that same format menu. That will then disappear from that top tab bar completely.
But don't panic, it's not gone. If you press the plus button here to make a new tab, then you're going to have the option to restore ones that you've previously hidden and make them visible again. It's not deleting them, it's just taking them off of that tab bar to give you more space to work on what's important.
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Technical details: This QuickTip was recorded on an 11″ iPad Pro (M4) running iPadOS 26.5 in July 2026.
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