The boss key, reborn for the browser
A boss key hides what you're really doing the instant someone appears. Sport Spreadsheet's is a single keystroke that drops your live scores behind an Excel “Protected View” — and brings them straight back when the coast is clear.
Tip: tap the ` button under the demo to watch it work.
A short history
What is a boss key?
The “boss key” is an old idea. Nineties shareware games shipped with one: a hotkey that instantly swapped the game for a fake spreadsheet or a memo, so it looked like you were working the moment the boss walked past. The cover screen was the whole trick.
Sport Spreadsheet turns that inside out. The spreadsheet isn't a fake cover you flip to — it's where you already are. The live sport lives inside a real, interactive spreadsheet, and the boss key simply blurs it behind the single most boring screen Office has to offer.
The panic test
Why alt-tabbing doesn't cut it
The instinct when someone appears is to frantically alt-tab or minimise. But the panic itself is the tell — a sudden flurry of window-switching is exactly what makes someone look harder. And if you're watching a stream, the bright moving video gives you away before you touch the keyboard.
A real boss key has to be one motion, instant, and land on something so dull that attention slides right off it. That's the bar Sport Spreadsheet is built to clear.
How it works
One keystroke, gone
Tap the backtick key
The ` key, just left of 1. The entire grid instantly drops behind an Excel-style “Protected View” banner that blurs the data. No animation delay — it's gone before they finish their step toward you.
Let their eyes slide off it
Protected View is the most familiar, most ignorable screen in Office. Nobody studies it. A passer-by reads “spreadsheet, busy” and moves on.
Tap it again to come back
Press the backtick once more and the live scores return exactly where you left them. There's also F9 to run a fake “recalculate” sweep if you want extra cover.
The perfect cover
Why “Protected View” is the ideal hiding place
When you open a file from the internet, Office shows a yellow “Protected View” bar warning you to be careful before editing. Every office worker has seen it a thousand times and dismissed it without a thought. That is precisely what makes it the perfect cover: it's expected, it's boring, and it signals “ordinary spreadsheet doing ordinary spreadsheet things.” Sport Spreadsheet reproduces it faithfully — so the screen a colleague glimpses is the one their brain has been trained to ignore.