This user's frustration cuts to the heart of a problem that too many teams accept as normal: the spreadsheet that tries to be everything to everyone. The idea was sound, create saved Sheet Views so each department sees only the columns it needs, then edits the same master data. It's the kind of workflow that should be simple. Instead, the user found that hidden columns refuse to stay hidden when switching between views. That's not a feature limitation. It's a sign that the tool itself is fighting against the way people actually work.
Here is what this tells us. Spreadsheets were designed for individual use, then retrofitted for collaboration. Sheet Views are an attempt to solve that mismatch, but they only work within the boundaries of a legacy architecture that treats visibility as a global setting, not a per-user preference. The user's experience, creating a view, hiding columns, saving it, then returning to find everything visible again, exposes a fundamental contradiction. The tool promises personalized views but cannot enforce them across sessions. For any team managing a shared operational template, this is not a minor annoyance. It is a workflow breaker.
The practical consequence is clear. Teams end up duplicating sheets, maintaining separate files for each department, or relying on manual hide-and-unhide rituals that introduce errors and waste time. None of those workarounds scale. And none of them address the real need: a single source of truth where each person sees exactly what they need, no more, no less. That is not a luxury. It is a basic requirement for any organization that expects multiple departments to collaborate on the same data without chaos.
Our opinion is plain: this problem should not exist. The technology to deliver smart visibility, where views are persistent, permission-aware, and tied to the user rather than the file, is well within reach. The user in this story did everything right. They identified a need, explored a built-in feature, and tested it honestly. The tool failed them. The lesson for anyone managing shared spreadsheets is to stop forcing tools to be what they are not. If your spreadsheet cannot preserve a simple column-hide across views, it is time to ask whether the spreadsheet itself is the right foundation for your team's data workflow.