An Excel "Bug"

     Sometimes, I think computer programmers call "problems" with programming "bugs" not because they refer to other abnormalities in programming code as "viruses," but because if they happen often enough, they "bug" the heck out of us.

     One of those "bugs" is inherent in the structure of Microsoft's Excel program...and it hasn't been able to be fixed, even through its assimilation into the Office Suite of software, all the way through today.

     Excel is an incredibly powerful program.  If you use it just to do budgets and crunch numbers, you're only using about a 10th of its capacity (sort of like our brains).  One of the things you can do with it is to "hide" certain columns and rows of information, so that if you need to access some data - but don't want to deal with all the calculations you had to make to get to those figures - you can "hide" those columns, and then "lock" the spreadsheet.  You can even protect the sheet with a password, so that if anyone wants to open it, they'll need a password that you created in order to do so.  You can then burn that file to a CD to share, or store it on a shared drive in an office environment.

     However, don't email that file to anyone if you want to keep your hidden information hidden.

     If you attach that type of file to an email, and then the person you send it to downloads it to their desktop or another file in their computer, the protection (hiding, locking, etc.) goes away.  The recipient sees everything you wanted to hide...all your forumulas and calculations will be exposed.

     If you have some formulas you've worked on for quite sometime, and want to keep those calculations private, they will be exposed.  If you've formatted your sheet to display your data in a meaningful way, your spreadsheet may lose that formatting and your project will be very confusing to the recipient.

     Best suggestion - keep your spreadsheet as a master...then copy what you want to be seen into another spreadsheet.  Or, make a .pdf file of the spreadsheet with Adobe Acrobat and email it.  If the recipient, however, wants to maintain the integrity of the project, so they can change some numbers and see the results of what those changes are, the best thing to do is to avoid emailing it, and place it on a shared drive.

© Michael V. Ziemski, Instrumediatech, 2008 (Original Publication Date: 20080324)

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