I reckon that today would be the last working day before Halloween and it might be your only chance to get even. So here are a few Excel tricks especially for you this Halloween – each one getting progressively meaner.

Send somebody a Workbook that just doesn’t Scroll the Right Way

This one is for your super boss (I mean boss’s boss). Now wish as you may, you really can’t do too many bad things to him, right – so this one’s simple. Open the spreadsheet that you plan to send him. In Excel 2003 and earlier, click “Tools” -> “Options” and select the International tab. Turn on the checkbox labelled “View Current sheet right-to-left”.

In Excel 2007, click on the developer tab and then click on properties. In the box that appears, set the third option ( it reads “DisplayRightToLeft”) to true.

So now your worksheet looks like this ! The cursor does exactly the opposite when you scroll from right to left. Let them rack their brain over this one for a while. This one’s for all the late night’s that you had to spend preparing the balance sheets and the board meeting presentations.

Ever seen 100’s of Files Littering the Desktop

This one is squarely for your boss. How many times has he/she told you that you should keep your desktop clean. It’s Halloween and it’s your turn. Email him this spreadsheet masquerading as a greeting. Once the animation is over, everybody’s happy. By that time the pesky little macro has littered their desktop with about a 100 text files!!! And if yours is a bit technological disadvantaged, you shall derive a great deal of pleasure watching them clean up their desktop and wonder how did it all happen. I had some harmless fun with it yesterday …

Tip : Just in case you have been blessed with an ignoramus, open the VBA editor and change the variable “NUMBER_OF_SCRAPS” to a say 1000 or an even higher value that satisfies your evil instincts 🙂

You can download the spreadsheet here or click on the button below:

Let’s get downright serious about fun

Ok that was a bit of fun but why stop a good thing. Just send this spreadsheet to your closest friends and watch them jump out of their seats. I am not going to tell you what’s in here but you can give it a try … go ahead .. yeah .. go ahead please …

You can download the spreadsheet here or click on the button below: