How to accidentally hide data with Excel
Here are 9 ways that make it more difficult for a review to spot that the data was incorrectly included in an Excel document, and this come from my experience of 20 or so years working as an accountant with Excel every day.
This all started when I heard of the data breach in Northern Ireland where the names of 10,000 officers and support staff of Police Service of Northern Ireland had their details revealed. It got me thinking about how you can hide data "in plain sight" in an Excel spreadsheet.
Just to clear things up - this wasn't a breach of an industrial level of data. 10,000 records would only amount to about 800k of data, which is the equivalent of a very small photo.
There's some downloadable content for you to play along with here
https://www.powerplatformlearn.academ...
00:00 Intro
01:31 The Police Service NI data breach in the media
02:22 The dataset we'll be working with
03:30 Hiding columns
03:43 Hiding Rows
04:40 Filtering data
04:56 Adding columns
05:20 Adding Rows
05:39 Changing fonts and styles
06:36 Hiding the sheet
07:25 Deleting the data sheet
08:30 Creating a Power Pivot data model
11:34 Using a csv file instead
13:46 Wrap up
#microsoft #excel
