Watch Out For Hidden Cells in Excel

There's a common function within Excel and most spreadsheet applications that allows cells, rows, columns, or entire sheets to be "hidden", which is an easy way to free up working space and temporarily disable parts of a document that don't need to be seen by the user.

Unfortunately, this can cause major problems in the CFO Scoreboard upload system.

Since "hiding" is a feature that only changes the display characteristics of the document, but does not change the content of the document, CFO Scoreboard will totally disregard whether cells or sheets are hidden or not.

So if you've been through several testing rounds of trying to eliminate a stubborn upload error, and nothing seems to change no matter how many things you tweak and correct, you might have a case of hidden rows, columns, or sheets.

Luckily the fix(es) for such a situation is easy:

1. To unhide all rows, hit Ctrl-A to select all, then mouse over any row number (far left edge of the Excel screen), right-click, and select Unhide.
2. To unhide all columns hit Ctrl-A to select all, then mouse over any column letter (far top edge of the Excel working screen), right-click, and select Unhide.
3. To unhide all sheets, right-click on the current sheet (bottom-left) and select Unhide if the option is available.

Once you've done this, you should see immediately whether any new data appears on the screen. If so, it's likely that your persistent upload error was hidden in one of those rows. Troubleshoot and repair as appropriate, and upload again!