Excel Headache

I hate Excel. 

Okay, so I really love Excel, but not at this particular moment.  Last night I spent hours creating beautiful, functional spreadsheets for my VBS that started today.  I had registration charts, badge data sheets, schedules . . . all kinds of things.  I printed them all out.  Gorgeous. 

I pressed save. 

I forgot something, so I immediately went back to reopen it when . . . UNBELIEVABLE!  Only one sheet existed in my file of formerly many.  Could the big data sheet have survived?  Nope.  Of course not.  All I got was some piddling list of first names with nothing else.  Virtually useless. 

Because I was doing this at midnight, I blamed operator error.  I had been copying and pasting like a fiend, so perhaps I had inadvertently copied the useless sheet onto the useful sheet before saving. 

Tonight I am convinced that is not the case because . . . if you can believe it . . . it happened AGAIN!!!!  Only worse because I had more data entered.  Oh yeah, I lost all the data from last night (that I had to re-enter) PLUS new data from today!  PLUS my fancy formatting, which everyone knows is really the biggest thing.  Data entry goes pretty quickly. 

I was really careful this time, too.  I literally saved after every little change.  And really, it's not even 10:30pm.  It is practically the middle of the day compared to the hours I have been working.  This should not have occurred. 

The kicker is that I use Excel all the time and have never had anything like this happen.  I have financial records dating back 4 years all in the same file.  (With color-coded tabs for active/inactive!) I used to simultaneously manage 6 grants at one time using ONE Excel file.  This is NOT rocket science. 

There is only one thing I can figure might have happened.  Both times the documents actually originated from an on-line source.  (You know the type: online forms that collect your data and have an option to "download as an Excel spreadsheet."  Usually works like a charm.)  When saving them, they gave a pesky little warning about saving in a different form because of different versions of Excel, blah blah blah. 

I usually ignore that warning because, frankly, I don't care if the yellow on my screen is the same yellow on the printed page or if Times New Roman prints more like Calibri.  I use older versions of Excel with 2007 all the time without difficulty. 

As I think back, however, I think this warning was a little different.  I seem to remember something about "comma delimited" something or other.  Hmmm.  I know that refers to how the program recognizes breaks in data, etc.  I thought is was a superficial formatting thing; I didn't think it would preclude saving multiple sheets. 

I have to say, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.  Why let me create the additional sheets in the first place if I can't keep them both?  Why not make an annoying dinging sound and give me a pop-up that says, "Hey, Dopey, this file format does not accommodate multiple pages.  Please save as a different format before trying to create additional sheets." 

Oh wait a minute . . . I guess maybe it did . . .