Excel never dies (2021)

- INCREMENTAL FIND WITHOUT A FAILURE MODAL in the ctrl-f window. Right now, when no match is found, it pops up a modal saying "no match found" that you have to dismiss! Jeff Atwood called this craziness out in 2006 https://blog.codinghorror.com/unnecessary-dialogs-stopping-t... it's amazing it's still in a flagship Microsoft product in 2022.

- REGEX FIND-REPLACE in the ctrl-f window. Put it in an "advanced" tab or something, but it would be invaluable when doing archaeology on some giganormous spreadsheet someone hands off to you, and you have to figure out wtf is going on. Or I need to make a complicated change across the whole spreadsheet and I'm wishing for something like sed or awk.

- REGEX match / substitution as a cell formula would be pretty neat too. String processing is pretty tricky as it is.

- MULTIPLE-SUBSTITUTION. If I need to replace many substrings in a string, I need to do ="SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(..." etc, it's annoying. Do for SUBSTITUTE what you did for IF: a SUBSTITUTES version (note the S) that would work like: "=SUBSTITUTES(string, substring1, replacement1, substring2, replacement2, ...)"

- INDENTING in the formula bar. I don't like having to tap space all the time or copypaste from Notepad++. Also: monospace font in the formula bar, pretty please.

- The "trace dependents" / "trace predecessors" thing, when you click on an arrow (hard to click btw, very narrow target), the window that pops up can't be resized, so you can't actually read a long formula. It should be resizable.

- You can merge cells horizontally or vertically, but it's generally discouraged in favor of "center across selection". Problem: you can only "center across selection" horizontally. Would be good to be able to do this vertically as well.

- When using the "check compatibility" feature, it takes a LOT of clicking through menus to find a possible problem, and then when you click "go to" (I forgot the exact name of the button, but whatever it is you click to see the cell where the incompatibility is), the compatibility checker window you came from disappears. So if you want to find another incompatibility, you have to go through all those menus again. Immense pain.

- My excitement of using PowerQuery was matched only by my disappointment of finding out that it doesn't support SQLite databases.

- Meta note: I saw someone from the Excel team post on /r/excel a while ago soliciting feedback. I wanted to give some of my own, but I had to go through some dumb bureaucracy, and the data consent form / NDA said Microsoft would get rights over my biometric data or something preposterous like that. I just wanted to give feedback to the Excel devs but not if there's such dystopian nonsense to deal with. Can I just email you? Or you email me, it's in the "about" part of my profile.

- A way to track down and squish ALL external links. Sometimes a warning pops up about external references but it's not actionable, because they can be lurking in so many dark corners and there's no way to enumerate all of them. It's not as simple as searching through formulae for things like "C:\"; they can be in weird shit like chart axis labels and conditional formatting and god knows what else. I've had cases where I've been working on a single Excel document as part of a team, and somebody unknowingly introduced external links somewhere, the warning came up, and we couldn't find them. Org policy said we couldn't distribute it if there were external links, so we basically had to "declare bankruptcy" and start again, carefully reproducing our work in a blank document, copying stuff over a piece at a time.

- Generally: better tools for understanding a large unfamiliar project. The predecessors / dependents feature is very anemic, but it's about the only thing on the menu right now for understanding macro-scale control flow and data dependence.

- Linting / "code quality" tools? I definitely don't want some kind of clippy-esque flow-breaking "it looks like you're using vlookup, did you know xlookup is better?" popup, but maybe some kind of tab or button to highlight formula antipatterns and suggest autofixes. E.g. it could detect nested IF and suggest an equivalent using IFS (flat is better than nested). One thing I've noticed is that experienced Excel users get kind of stuck in their ways and don't know about new features that can simplify things, but if they got used to consulting this system, it would alert them to new features in a natural, non-annoying way. You could put this into the "check for problems" system, people are already used to checking that for version incompatibility and accessibility.

.. this is more than a few things, I kept thinking of more stuff as I was writing.