Stupid Excel Tricks...

 All right, I admit it, I am a numbers nerd.  

Seriously.  Many long years ago when I was living at home with my parents, my father worked down the hallway from an in-house print shop.  Some of their printing was outsourced, some of it was done in house.  And some of their printers had time and ... well, ideas.  

I guess someone, somewhere, decided producing blank pads of paper was a good idea.  But they seemed to have a real problem with size.  Dad came home with these pads of paper which were easily 15 x 20 inches, and a good 3/4" of an inch thick.  And my favorite thing to do was to start up in the upper left corner with a random number.  I'd double it.  And continue right down that edge, then start a second column, and so on, and so on.  Until I filled the page with a number that was, sometimes, 25 or more digits long.  Mind you, I didn't have anyone to check my work, but it was ... well, I thought it was fun.

So I don't suppose the first spreadsheet I laid my hands on was going to be boring, either.  Yeah, I know, I'm a nerd.  I remember figuring out a bunch of the formula tools, and decided I wanted to see if what I had been told was true.  I didn't have the kind of free time to generate a million dice rolls and see if rolling two six-sided dice would generate a bell curve over time.  But you know what?  With the limited amount of RAM on that first IBM PC (a whopping 640K, my friends, for the OS AND Lotus 123 AND data), I was able to produce a spreadsheet that had 250,000 rolls, and produced a fairly reasonable bell curve.  I put together the chart (because we had the genuine Hercules Graphics Card in that beast, I know, we were indeed lucky, even if it was only a two-color computer), and did other weird things with numbers and formulae on that thing.

I've spent a fair amount of time mucking about with spreadsheet tools since - Lotus 123, Quattro, Excel, and Calc from Open Office.  And today I discovered a genuinely stupid Excel trick I'd never run into before.

Mind you, I'm working with a much more advanced version of Office on my work computer than I'm genuinely comfortable with.  Mind you, I've got a document up daily which is where I record various tips and bits of information I do not wish to lose.  And in using a few simple styles in that document, I can create a quick table of contents that helps me find the information I'm storing there.  And I have several spreadsheets open that track various things or generate totals for me.

But today I discovered an entirely new, utterly idiotic feature I was totally ignorant of in Excel.  I was working with a spreadsheet to set up some data and total it and as the data set I was working with was growing larger, I needed titles to remain displayed.  In the old days there was a divider you'd drag, or other techniques.  These days, it's called "Freeze Pane".  I have to stop and think, usually, because I do not use it often, so I want to be sure I select the correct option.  

And while doing this, my computer beeped.  That screen, all the way over on the left, was the opposite end of the three monitors I normally work with, as I usually keep Excel all the way over on the right.  So my head turned, I clicked the mouse, and headed to the other monitor.  The unexpected "bing" noise was about something that had completed elsewhere, so I did what I needed to do there, then headed back to Excel...  And my spreadsheet was gone.  I don't mean "messed up" gone.  I mean "not displaying on that or any other monitor" gone.  I looked high and low, figured it must be one of those restart things, so I saved the other four spreadsheets I had open (one that tracks my time, one that I track my productivity, one that keeps track of a bunch of addresses and passwords, and one that calculates intervals, doses, how much I need to get approved, and etc.), and the fifth, doing my calculations, was totally missing.  

I shut Excel down, restarted, double-clicked on the file I needed ...  and nuffin.  It did not load, it did not display, not a peep.  

And so, as one tends to do when one has those WTF moments, I said "well, reboot."  Dropped out of the primary application I use via VPN, get out of the half-dozen or so Notepad documents I have open, close down my PDF editor, my PDF reader, File Mangler, Teams, Outlook, Word, the VPN software, three other applications I need, and both browsers, both of which have a half-dozen windows open...  And reboot.  Log in, connect to the VPN, connect to Citrix, get the main app up, get everything else up, load Excel, load all of my other documents, then load the spreadsheet I need....  and it's nowhere to be found on any of my three monitors.

However, I look closely at the Excel menu and see the option "Hide".  Hide what?  What the heck?  It's in the general vicinity of the View menu, which is where the Freeze Panes options are for screen titles.  So I take a closer look.  There's a couple of boxes, hide, unhide, and others.  But the Hide box looked like it had a partial line through it.  I wiped the monitor.  Nope, it wasn't a spot on that monitor.  So I put the mouse over it, and the tool tip popped up, telling me I can use it to hide the window.  

Why, I asked myself, would you need to hide a spreadsheet?  Oh, wait, perhaps you're looking at how much you can afford to pay your next hire, when the current staff stops by for a chat.  Or you're the CFO looking to ... accomplish other than widely acknowledged financial goals?  Well, yeah.  

But it also said that if I wished to unhide something hidden, I should check the unhide box.  Wait a minute, there's an indication something's hidden on the screen, when you hide it, so someone who knows where to look will find that you hid something.  OK.  But I guess I'm just too much of a Boy Scout to even consider needing to hide a spreadsheet.  But I clicked the "Unhide" option, wondering if the thesaurus at Microsoft is about four pages long, or maybe it never occurred to them to use the word "Reveal".  

But there was my missing spreadsheet.  

Felt like a total idiot, but at least I learned something else useless I could do with Office...  So I got that going for me...