The Alien Landscape Lurking Inside Excel 97

A screen shot from Excel 97's deep space Easter egg game

A LITTLE KNOWN aspect of Excel 97 could give the term "spreadsheet jockey" a whole new meaning.

It turns out there is an alien world exploration game hidden inside buttoned-down Excel. Here's how to trade Excel's wingtips for an inter-planetary survey craft.

In Excel 97, open a new blank work sheet. Press F5 (go to function) and type X97:L97 in the Reference box, then click OK. Now hit your tab key once (you should end up in cell M97). Press both the "Ctrl" and "Shift" keys while clicking once on the "chart wizard" icon (the one at the top with the blue-yellow-red bar chart).

After a few moments you should be flying. You can steer with the mouse, accelerate and decelerate with the left and right mouse buttons respectively. Exit by pressing the Ctrl, Shift and Esc keys at the same time. You can also hit Esc to quit, but then you must restart Excel and do it all over again to get back, according to BugNet subscriber Bill Shockey, who tipped us to this.

Your mission: find the monolith with the programmer credits. As you'll see, it's not as easy as it looks. This may be the most elaborate Easter egg we've ever seen. (Easter eggs are credits hidden within a program).

While it offers a wonderful tonic for hours of dry number crunching, Excel's space game also helps explain why programs -- specifically Excel -- have become so large.

-- Bruce Brown

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