I work internal support for a company where Excel is basically treated like a second operating system.

Got a ticket from a user saying their monitor had “shrunk Excel” and they needed a replacement. Not that Excel was blurry. Not that the monitor was damaged. The monitor had apparently decided to make Excel too small.

I remote in and ask them to show me the issue.

They open a spreadsheet and, yes, everything is tiny. Like ant accounting tiny. Columns, rows, text, all of it. I ask if other programs look normal. They open Outlook. Normal. Browser. Normal. Desktop icons. Normal.

Only Excel has offended them.

I look at the bottom right corner.

Zoom: 10%.

I ask if they remember changing the zoom. They say no, and then immediately say “I only moved that little slider because I was trying to see more columns.”

Right.

I slide it back to 100%. Spreadsheet returns to human size.

User goes quiet for a second, then says “so the monitor is fine?”

Yes. The monitor has bravely survived this incident.

They thanked me, but still asked if they could get a bigger monitor anyway because “Excel has too many boxes.”

Ticket closed as user education, which is the polite way of saying Excel was not the problem today.