About Spreadsheet How-To

What changed, and what it changed for you

When Spreadsheet How-To began, it was a single blog post about fixing a frozen Excel file, written in the middle of the night after a particularly frustrating workday.

The first 50 articles were a mix of half-baked troubleshooting and unedited screenshots from Windows 98.

Now, every tutorial follows a strict template: a clear problem statement, step-by-step instructions with screenshots from Windows 11, macOS, and Linux, and a ‘what went wrong’ section for common mistakes. We even include a ‘last tested’ date so you know if the guide is still relevant. The biggest change?

No more guessing. If a method doesn’t work on three different setups, it doesn’t get published.

The one that took years

The biggest mistake was assuming readers would figure out which OS a tutorial applied to. For years, screenshots were labeled only as ‘Windows’ or ‘Mac,’ and Linux users had to hunt for clues in the text. The problem wasn’t just confusion—it was wasted time.

A single guide might get 500 views, but only 20% would actually work for the reader because the steps didn’t match their setup.

It stayed that way for three years because I didn’t realize how much it mattered. I thought ‘cross-platform’ just meant mentioning all three OSes in the same article.

Then a reader emailed—well, left a comment, really—to say they’d spent two hours trying to follow a ‘Windows’ guide on Linux, only to give up when the keyboard shortcuts didn’t match. That was the wake-up call.

Fixing it cost time and money. We rewrote every tutorial to include OS-specific steps, added a ‘for’ tag at the top of each page, and hired a Linux user to fact-check every guide.

Now, the site’s search filters by OS, and we even run a weekly check to flag outdated screenshots. It’s not perfect—Linux still gets the shortest end of the stick—but at least readers know upfront what they’re getting.

Meet the author

I used to believe tech tutorials were like recipes: if you followed the steps exactly, they’d work. So I wrote them that way—dry, linear, with no room for the fact that most people’s computers weren’t identical to mine.

I’d test a fix on my dual-boot Windows/Linux machine, declare it ‘universal,’ and move on. The worst part? I never asked readers what failed. If a guide got 100 comments, I’d assume it was popular, not broken.

I also treated software like it was static. A tutorial for Windows 7 would sit untouched for years, even after Microsoft stopped supporting it. Once, I linked to a 2012 guide for fixing Outlook crashes in an article about Office 365—because ‘it’s the same problem, right?’ Wrong.

The reader who caught that mistake saved me from sending hundreds of people down the wrong path.

What changed is that I started listening to the people who wrote in—not to praise me, but to say ‘this didn’t work.’

Now, I run this site to make tech feel less like a minefield. If Jerome Thibodeaux can’t explain how to do something in three different ways, it doesn’t belong here.

Whether it’s a beginner’s guide to VLOOKUP or a deep dive into Linux permissions, the goal is the same: no more guessing. If you’re reading this, you’re already ahead of where I was five years ago.

What did not change

The site still starts with the same rule: if I can’t explain it without jargon, it’s not ready. That’s why you’ll never see ‘advanced’ as a filter—every tutorial assumes you’re starting from scratch. The other thing that hasn’t budged is the ‘no fluff’ policy.

No fake urgency (‘Learn Excel in 10 minutes!’), no clickbait headlines, and no ads between steps. Tech problems are frustrating enough without gimmicks.

We also still believe the best tutorials fix a specific, painful problem. The most-viewed guides aren’t about ‘10 Excel Tips’—they’re about ‘Why your pivot table keeps showing #DIV/0’ or ‘How to recover a corrupted Access database.’ Those are the ones that keep people coming back. The rest can go elsewhere.

What is still being fixed

Right now, we’re working on two big things: making every tutorial work on mobile devices (yes, even the screenshot-heavy ones) and adding a ‘difficulty’ tag so readers can skip the basics if they’re already comfortable. The other project?

A search tool that actually understands tech terms—because typing ‘why my printer won’t print’ should return guides on drivers, not just ‘how to buy ink.’

If you’ve got a tech problem that’s still unsolved, or a guide that didn’t work for you, the contact page is where to tell us about it.