How to hide Smartsheet sidebar

Works on every website · takes about 10 seconds · free

Smartsheet parks a vertical sidebar on every sheet — conversations, attachments, proofs, publish, activity log. Genuinely useful the moment you need it. The other 95% of the time? It just sits there, eating a strip of screen real estate your columns, rows and dashboards could be using. There's no setting to collapse it away for good.

Three panels: the Smartsheet sidebar always visible, then highlighted by HideIt with a click-to-hide tooltip, then hidden with the space reclaimed — Point. Click. Gone — and your sheet gets the full width back.

Why it gets in the way

If a panel isn't being used at all, why is it on the page? Every always-on element is one more thing your eyes have to skip past — and research on visual clutter is clear: small distractions compound into real productivity loss. Anything you find annoying or distracting while you work is costing you focus. HideIt flips the default: hide the things you don't need, keep only what moves the work forward, and reclaim the full width of your sheet. When you actually need the sidebar, un-hiding it takes one click in the popup — nothing about your Smartsheet account or data changes; HideIt only hides things from your own view.

The 10-second fix

HideIt is a free browser extension that hides any element you point at — including widgets inside iframes that normally swallow your clicks and open instead of hiding.

1. Install HideIt — free for Chrome, Firefox and Safari (register below to get the link at launch).
2. Turn it on — click the HideIt icon on the page that's bugging you. Until you do, HideIt can't see the page at all.
3. Click the widget — hover Smartsheet sidebar until the red outline wraps it, click, choose Every visit. Gone — and it stays gone, even if the site re-injects it.

Chat widgets live in iframes that eat your clicks — click one normally and it opens. HideIt paints a shield over the widget while picking, so your click hides it instead of feeding it.

The manual way (if you like pain)

You can open DevTools, find the element (the sidebar rail container on the right edge of the sheet), and write a custom CSS rule in an ad-blocker. It works until the site changes its markup — HideIt's self-healing selectors handle that for you, and re-hide the element if the site sneaks it back.

Does hiding it break the site?

No — HideIt only hides what you clicked, nothing else. If you ever want it back, open the HideIt popup and un-hide it in one click, per site, per element.

Get HideIt free + launch alert

HideIt lands on Chrome, Firefox and Safari this week. Register and we'll email you the install link the moment it's live — plus you get priority support. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.