Gates-speak

Last night (Thursday, May 14, 2009) was an effort to set up a new Excel® chart for running at the so-called elitist country-club, identical to the charts I had last year.
Last year I had a single Excel spreadsheet with three charts, each 26 items long; the number of characters in the alphabet.
I started a new spreadsheet with my first run this year. Now I had a second run, so could do a chart.
“Something is wrong,” I say. My chart is not identical to previous charts, and makes no sense.
“So use last year’s spreadsheet as a starting-point,” Linda suggests; “and then all your previous formatting is in place.”
Capital idea! I save last year’s spreadsheet as this year, and then delete the three rows of information.
First row is formatted as dates; then the second and third rows are custom-formatted as minutes and seconds and tenths of seconds, although it shows up as clock-time in the working window. (??????)
Third row is identical to the second row, as it’s the sum of the column — just the second row.
Now, chart-function. Chart contents of third row. It will be an up-and-down line.
“Not logical,” Excel asserts.
Okay; I determine that’s because no values are in columns selected but to the right of the two columns that have values.
Okay; insert zero as the total in each empty column.
Now we’re getting somewhere; I have a chart identical to last year’s chart.
But it wants to be chart #4. Charts 1 through 3 are still there.
So I need a “delete chart.”
I poke all around, but no “delete chart” function.
“I’m sure I did it once,” I say.
There is a “delete-sheet” function, but I don’t wanna delete the spreadsheet the charts work off of.
Do I call in the support of Excel-master, the guy who taught my Excel class?
I try the Excel “Help” function. Nothing about “delete chart.”
Finally, after taking a break and walking the dog, I decide it’s do-or-die time — time for a fearsome experiment. Just like the mighty Mezz.
I have on my screen the chart I wanna delete, and hit “delete-sheet.”
If this deletes my working sheet, I don’t save it. —And I still have the entire spreadsheet from last year I started with.
VIOLA; the suspect chart is gone, but my working spreadsheet is still there.
GATES-SPEAK ALERT! Apparently a sheet is also a chart.
I delete the other charts, so now I can rename “Chart-Four” as “Chart-One.”
How, pray tell, am I supposed to know the strange Gates lingo; that a chart is also a sheet?

“The so-called elitist country-club” is nearby Boughton (“BOW-tin” as in “ow”) Park, where I run and we walk our dog. It was called that long ago by an editor at the Canandaigua Daily-Messenger newspaper (the “mighty Mezz”), where I once worked, because it will only allow taxpayers of the three towns that own it to use it. We are residents of one of those towns. —At the Messenger I was sort of a computer-tech geek. Although most of what I knew was self-taught; the result of “fearsome experiments.”

“Linda” is my wife of 41+ years. She programed computers before she retired.

Our current dog is “Scarlett;” a rescue Irish-Setter. She’s almost four, and is our sixth Irish-Setter.

“Gates” is Bill Gates, the head of Microsoft, developer of the Excel® spreadsheet software.