Hey everyone, cozyplanes here with another quick excel prank i thought of.

It is called TEEST, and the technique behind is simple, but interesting. Recommend taking a look, and pranking with your friends.

The following is the README of TEEST (Text in Excel Every Single Time) in Github.
You can check the simple project here ( https://github.com/cozyplanes/teest )

Disclaimer: Do not use or modify neither the program or the source code to make software violating the law.

### How do I use it?

1. Head to https://github.com/cozyplanes/teest and download the latest release `EXE` file.
1. Windows may warn you with the missing signature. The file is a DEBUG file, so there isn't a publisher signature. You can proceed downloading anyway since it has been virus checked by the developer.
2. Type the message you want to display in the textbox.
3. Click `Save text` button.
5. To check the file, click `Cancel` button in the opened popup dialog.

### What happens?

When an MS Excel file (`.xlsx`) has been opened, by using TEEST, two files gets opened.

1. The original file user opened
2. Excel file named `message.txt` with the custom message you have written.

`message.txt` excel file will open every single time a person opens a excel file.

*In some older versions of Excel, the message may overlap with the user opened file.*

### Why does this happen?

When MS Excel program is executed, it is programmed to check the files in the following 2 folders.

- `C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office[versionnumber]\XLSTART`
- `C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Excel\XLSTART`

In normal conditions, there is no file in those folders (or the folders doesn't exist at all) but when you use TEEST and click `Save text` button, it saves `message.txt` file in the folders above. From MS Excel is executed again, it will find out there is a file in the folders above, so it will show those text files in Excel.

### Where is this technique used?

There should be a lot of software using this trick, but it is widely known for ransomwares such as `GandCrab` and `TeslaCrypt` displaying decryption methods in MS Excel by this trick.

### How can I disable it?

1. Open TEEST again.
2. Click `Save text` button and click `Cancel` in the following popup.
3. Delete `message.txt` file in the opened explorer.

### LICENSE

This software is under the MIT License. Refer to the `LICENSE` file for more information.

### Contact

<cozyplanes@tuta.io>

Spam/Ads not allowed. Please only send questions or concerns about the software. It may take up to 48 hours to get a reply.

"Microsoft Excel interprets a blank cell as zero, and not as empty or blank."

blank != blank

official: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us...
Thanks MS

After my first ever "thing" I wrote (see story here: https://devrant.com/rants/2132057/...) fast forward 7 years to my first project when I /* thought I */ knew what I was doing and didn't write just for myself.
Preset:
I worked in a very small company distributing various materials for medical research, many of them bought from manufacturers and then relabelled as if we had produced it. One part of that was to indicate a production batch / lot number. Before I started there, they would just invent a random number on the spot and use that on the new label and somewhere write it down to document that, I at least used an Excel sheet to have numbers prepared and document it on the same line (still crappy but more than nothing). After some time my boss got the idea to have all of that documented in MS Access (because that was the only database he knew). I had just started with HTML, PHP and MySQL in apprentice school around the same time, so I proposed writing an appropriate solution using those and got permission.
-----

I started coding and learnt so much that I didn't need to pay attention at school anymore as I was years ahead of the curriculum (the others were struggling with If-statements and the likes).
When I was done with Version 1.0 of my web application, it was of course still crude as hell. I used html forms to save input (like editor.php -> submit to save.php, do save -> redirect to editor.php), but it did what had not been done before: keeping it all together and force people to do it properly. 2 years later I wrote a version 2, adding features that showed to be useful and with improved structure, as my last project before leaving, and as far as I know, they are still using it, which is at this point 2 years after I've left.
Looking back I would do it differently, but for what I knew back then it was not bad at all.

I don't live in a vacuum. I need to open an occasional Adobe bs format file (Illustrator, Premiere, After Effects, Photoshop). An occasional MS Office file too (Access, Word, Excel, PowerPoint). And don't tell me LibreOffice supports .docx. It doesn't support edits suggestion mode well enough. I needed AutoCAD for a period of time.

Desktop Linux people, what do you want me to do? Go to devRant and post “windows bad” rant? Go cry on Reddit?

I too think Windows is evil and 11 is essentially malware, but when I suddenly need those things done yesterday, and my livelihood depends on that, I have no choice.

(this is part 2 of this rant: https://devrant.com/rants/10703825/...)