Access: Unhide Objects or Groups in Navigation Pane

I like to use custom groups to organize objects in my Microsoft Access databases. In any case, yesterday I decided that I no longer wanted to see one of those groups in the list, so I right-clicked it and chose 'Hide'. It was great! It disappeared completely from sight, and I was happy.

...happy until I realized that I wanted to see those objects again. Usually I don't have much trouble with this sort of thing, but I'm writing this post today because I found it particularly difficult to unhide that group. Something tells me I'm not the only person who has experienced this frustration.

If you want to unhide those objects/groups, what you first are going to want to do is to configure your navigation settings to show hidden objects. Go to the 'File' tab on the ribbon, and select 'Options'. You should be on the 'Current Database' tab by default. Just one section down, you'll find 'Navigation'. Click on the 'Navigation Options...' button. Next, select the 'Show Hidden Objects' checkbox (in the bottom left-hand corner). Press 'OK' twice to confirm, and now you'll see anything that you've hidden in your navigation pane. Hidden items are dimmed, so you can easily spot them.

Now you are free to right-click and 'Unhide' anything you like. When you're done, you're probably going to want to go and uncheck that checkbox to make sure that hidden stuff stays hidden again. Your choice, though!

Hopefully this will save someone the time that I spent trying to figure this out. Until next time... have a great day!

8 comments:

  1. You help much,But I still don't get it why microsoft should ever make it this this hard.

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  2. Just wanted you to know this saved my bacon. I hid a table on accident and had no idea how to get it back. The setting to unhide is so hidden in menus, hiding a query basically equates to deleting it for the average user.
    Thanks.

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  3. Thanks for publishing this article. I would never have found this option. You saved me.

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  4. Thank you....that process is absurd...

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  5. THANK YOU SO MUCH for sharing this ! =)

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  6. Thanks Microsoft for making things illogical. This is a large trend anyway...

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