An after the fact reply for info....congratulations on finding your way out of the dilemma.
Thanks….I was doing some serious sweating for a while there.
If you hover your cursor over the little Green dot in the upper left corner of the Excel window, you should get a tool-tip contextual info that will tell you about entering Full Screen mode….
No info on my Excel (14.7.7). Hovering over the green dot produces two opposing arrows and clicking on it expands the sheet dramatically.