Inherited spreadsheets with white fill instead of hidden gridlines
Previous creators often fill entire spreadsheets white just to hide the gridlines instead of using proper view settings. This manual formatting hides the underlying structure and forces people taking over new roles to completely recreate the files from scratch.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
- 1Ctrl + A and No fill
- 2Ctrl + A and then Alt + H + H + N
- 3Recreating or cleaning up poorly designed spreadsheets from scratch
- 4Focusing on solving the immediate problem rather than trying to understand how others created it
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“I had a controller have me (at the time a senior) find a $0.01 offage on a comparison of a loan amortization schedule vs our books.”source ↗
“I'm at a new job and have for the first time inherited a bunch of spreadsheets where someone filled the entire thing white because they didn't want to see the gridlines.”source ↗
“He bragged about how accurate our books were, but didn't see the stupidity of effective spending $1000 of our salaries looking for $.01”source ↗
“I've cleaned (technically recreated) so many spreadsheets. The people I deal with that (over) complicate things are those that don't understand accounting.”source ↗
“Dealing with someone who can't reconcile 🙄”source ↗
Where this came up
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