ColVis is a plug-in for DataTables which presents a list of all columns to a user and allows them to select which ones they wish to be visible. Click the 'Show / hide columns' button to be presented with a list of columns in the table, and click the buttons to show and hide them as you wish.

You may wish to use your own text in the ColVis button - this is done by making use of the buttonText initialization option, as shown in this example.

It can at times be useful to exclude columns from being in the 'show / hide' list (for example if you have hidden information that the end user shouldn't be able to make visible. This can be done by the exclude ColVis configuration parameter when creating the DataTable. This is simply an array of integers, indicating which columns should be excluded. This example shows the first column being excluded.

The default activation (showing the columns list) for ColVis is for the user to click the button. This can be altered to a mouseover activation by making use of the activate initialization option and setting it to mouseover. This is shown in the example below.

This demo of ColVis shows its ability to add "Restore", "Show all" and "Show none" buttons to the list of column visibility options. This is done with the restore, showAll and showNone options which can be enabled individually if needed.