Newfangled Hexx-Cell®

At the beginning of every new year, I generate two new Excel spreadsheets for our income-tax.
These don’t really apply any more, since it is no longer to our advantage to itemize deductions.
We qualify for the geezer deduction. It’s higher than itemizing.
My two Excel spreadsheets are -1) itemized deductions, and -2) income.
Even the income spreadsheet no longer applies.
We only have four incomes: Social-Security for each, and pensions for each.
We’re not hitting our IRAs yet; we don’t need to.
We get statements from each income-source, and they usually don’t agree with my spreadsheet.
This is especially true of Social-Security.
I go with the statements. They’re what’s reported to the Infernal-Revenue-Service.
What I do is copy my old header-row and paste it onto a new spreadsheet.
Dead simple, except Microsoft seems to have “improved” (???????) Excel.
Almost two years ago I bought this new laptop.
It replaced an old tower I was using.
That tower had Excel-98 on it, what I had been using, and knew fairly well.
I still have that tower. It was state-of-the-art 10 years ago.
It has Quark® on it, and I use it when I need Quark.
I’m not about the spill 89 bazilyun dollars for a newer Quark for this laptop, not when I do so little with it.
I had it on the tower because it was one of the “Big Three” the Mighty Mezz used: Photoshop®, Freehand®, and Quark. (I had all three.)
The newspaper was paginated in Quark.
My Quark is 4.1 — ancient.
My macho blowhard brother-from-Boston, who noisily badmouths everything I do or say, calls it “Quack,” and claims Microsoft Word® is superior.
Well it isn’t, or at least wasn’t.
The Mighty Mezz was paginated with Quark. At that time Quark ran circles around Word.
I’ve had experience with both. Quark was much more flexible and capable.
Years ago I paginated a union newsletter with Word.
But at the Mighty Mezz I discovered Quark; that it was so much more powerful.
So I copied my header-row off my 2011 spreadsheet, and pasted it onto a new Excel spreadsheet.
WHOA! Nothing worked like usual. My header-row was taking up two rows because I couldn’t widen columns, at least not like I had done previously.
And furthermore my new Excel spreadsheet had a four-letter file-extension: .xlsx, not .xls as it had been in the past.
Apply guile-and-cunning.
The “save-as” window has a “save-as Excel-98” option, so I tried that.
VIOLA! Back to the Excel I know.
.xlsx must be the new improved Excel, although if so it’s not improved in my humble opinion.
Not if I can’t work with it without a lot of research and/or fore-knowledge.
Excel-98 I pretty much learned on my own, although I had an Excel guru helping at Bloomfield Central School.
There were only two of us in the class, and the other poor girl was totally buffaloed.
I was the only one making any progress.
The guru was showing me shortcuts and making suggestions I found interesting.
For example: “You can widen your columns by doing such-and-such.”
So how does one do that with the new improved Excel?
Must I use Microsoft’s dreaded help-section?
89 bazilyun Frequently-Asked-Questions.
Chat with techies in India?
“We understand your concern, and are happy to help.”
After that, “Uh-duh.”

• “Quark” is a very powerful word-processor, among other things. It can be used to do complete and complicated pages — including pictures.
• The “Mighty Mezz” is the Canandaigua Daily-Messenger newspaper, from where I retired six years ago. Best job I ever had — I worked there almost 10 years. (“Canandaigua” [“cannan-DAY-gwuh”] is a small city nearby where we live in Western NY. The city is also within a rural town called “Canandaigua.” The name is Indian, and means “Chosen Spot.” —It’s about 14 miles away.)
• “Paginate” means to completely generate a page (like for a newspaper or a magazine). Bring the stories in and flow them into story-boxes, and also add “art” (pictures, whatever).
• RE: “Bloomfield Central School........” —We live in the small rural town of West Bloomfield in Western NY, southeast of Rochester. Adjacent is the rural town of East Bloomfield, and the village of Bloomfield is within it. Bloomfield Central School is the high-school within the village. The Excel course was a night-course.