6 ms·
A similar annoyance is the fact that excel's undo applies to all open excel files. Make a change in a.xls, make a change in b.xls. if you ctrl-z twice with b.xl
by cka 3y ago
A similar annoyance is the fact that excel's undo applies to all open excel files. Make a change in a.xls, make a change in b.xls. if you ctrl-z twice with b.xls focused, it'll undo both of the above changes!
This has bitten me more than once. Does anyone actually want this behavior?
- o1y32 3y agoI ran into this issue and looked it up. It was an intentional design choice, and kind of makes sense when you realize that Excel sheets can have reference of each other -- they are not necessarily independent. Of course a lot of people probably never do that in their entire lifetime when using Excel and can feel annoying.
- strictfp 3y agoThey could solve that by keeping track of references and asking you though.
- greggsy 3y agoAs a daily Excel power user, I'd prefer to just know that there is one expected behaviour, and not to be bothered by a context window. The fact that ctrl-z just changes context to the other workbook is enough notification in itself, and I can just ctrl-y otherwise.
- solarkraft 3y agoWouldn't it be a good compromise to ask you on the first occurrence?
- greggsy 3y agoNo, because I get the point about context very, very quickly. I can’t imagine anything worse than being asked every time when I know exactly what’s going to happen.
- jtbayly 3y agoSheets or docs? Within one doc, and multiple sheets makes sense, I guess. Across docs doesn’t make sense to me.
- gruez 3y agoYou can definitely reference cells across workbooks
- datathrow0007 3y agoDocs. It's for when you want to have distributed data stores. For example, if you're building out a doc to track your net worth, income, and spending habits: - One main sheet that collates all the data required here (e.g. credit card statements, in-flows and out-flows from bank accounts, current debts and current assets) - Have 3 more docs: One that collates and summarizes your credit card charges One that collates your bank statements One that collates your assets and liabilities /// Let's say my "credit card charges" sheet automatically pulls in my charges over API, and appends them to the "Charges" sheet in the "Credit Card.xls." Then the "Summary" sheet in this "Credit Card.xls" summarizes this information into something useful. My "Main.xls" (that collates all of my data into something even more readable and useful) can then pull data from this "Credit Card.xls" sheet (through API or locally), and automatically keep itself updated. I could stuff this all into one single doc, with numerous sheets, but I don't want to deal with the cognitive overhead of having to navigate through an enormous amount of sheets I rarely (if ever) need to touch (again). Perhaps I don't even have access to the physical "Credit Card.xls" doc, because my personal assistant automatically appends to it, and keeps it uploaded somewhere.
- jtbayly 3y agoIf the point is to only have to work with one doc, then undo across docs is still not useful.
- CamperBob2 3y agoI could stuff this all into one single doc, with numerous sheets, but I don't want to deal with the cognitive overhead of having to navigate through an enormous amount of sheets I rarely (if ever) need to touch (again). So instead, everybody else has to deal with the cognitive overhead of a document model that is used by no other mainstream PC software program known to Man.
- AraceliHarker 3y agoSince Windows 11 includes extensive telemetry, it is possible that Microsoft intentionally designed it this way for user productivity.
- masfuerte 3y agoExcel has several UI quirks that date back decades. It's never been consistent with the rest of Office even. If Microsoft changed it the accountants would revolt.
- prawel 3y agodo you have some examples of that quirks?
- andy81 3y agoYou can expect data to be destroyed when automatically parsing csv/tsv (default behaviour), especially because it's dependent on the last settings used in the text-to-columns wizard. Then there's all well-known bugs like floating point addition and locale-dependent function names and 1904 dates. Conditional formatting accidentally pasting is all over the place.
- jonhohle 3y agoAs others have mentioned, copying and pasting in Excel is bizarre. Highlight the cells to copy; select copy - the source cells now have marching ants around them; perform any action that causes the marching ants to disappear and that content can no longer be pasted. It’s as if those cells are locked as the copy buffer as opposed to some in memory copy like every other copy operation.
- someweirdperson 3y agoIt is neither copy nor paste. The copy is "remember this as reference" and paste is "do to this cell to make it relatively similar to the other". Cut and paste is even better. If the cell to be cut is being referenced, the referencing cell can magically update to the place to paste to. Selecting and copying the /content/ of a cell is a very normal copy and paste operation.
- tinus_hn 3y agoI think Excel is still the old mdi application that has been hacked to look like a sdi application. It’s only a recent innovation that it is possible to have two files open with the same filename.
- colejohnson66 3y agoThey fixed that "same file name" annoyance? We have Office 2021(?) at work and it still has that "feature".
- dspillett 3y agoThat must be a very recent change - I'm sure I've run into that limitation not more than a few months ago.
- taneq 3y agoI'm continually bewildered by some of Excel's design choices. You can't have two files with the same filename open at the same time even if the files are in different directories. And you can't, for some reason, save to a path with square brackets in it. (You can save it with round brackets, rename the file, and then load the file perfectly fine, though.)
- datavirtue 3y agoAll of that sounds perfectly sensible.
- weinzierl 3y agoI haven't used Excel much in the past decades but I'm surprised to see the undo behaviour remaining unchanged. Next time you tell me 1904 date formatting is still a thing...
- gpvos 3y agoExcel is the archetypal backwards compatible program.
- scrlk 3y agoYou can work around this by starting a fresh instance of Excel. Run -> "Excel.exe /x"
- tragomaskhalos 3y agoExcel is a law unto itself. The 'feature' that irritates me the most is how a cell copy is forgotten unless you paste immediately. Bear in mind that this is an application so iconoclastic that it had its own C compiler.
- philistine 3y agoThis is the thing with Excel. It has such a long history that it had to invent a ton of GUI interactions. A boatload of those interactions were codified in Excel before we created standard ways of doing things that even macOS, Windows and Linux share. In that sense, the modern history of Excel is the slow regression of the app to OS conventions. For the longest time, Excel had its own windowing system within the app. It's only recently that the Office team saw the light and let the whole OS called Windows control window management in Excel.
- PhilipRoman 3y agoOne program that does copying right IMO is tmux, it keeps a list of recently copied things, which you can view by pressing Ctrl-B = and choose which clipboard to paste. Very useful when you need to copy multiple separate strings without going back and forth between windows. I've caught myself doing optimistic copying - if I see something that i might need to paste in the future, like git commit hashes, file names, etc. I just copy them all and store them in the clipboard list. I think there is a program "clipmenu" which does this for X11, but haven't used it too much.
- taskforcegemini 3y agonotepad++ has this feature, and I think current windows versions do as well
- pawelduda 3y agoThis is my must have extension. Gnome has one and there's an app for that on MacOS. Multiple clipboard entries are such a trivial but useful change that I can't go back to the old way anymore
- 3y ago
- kevin_thibedeau 3y agoExcel is an MDI app pretending to have one document per window. It still has the unified undo buffer from that architecture.