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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?
I tested to see what some popular Linux file managers do in this scenario, GNOME Files and KDE Dolphin. Neither of them have undo in the right-click menu. Pressing ctrl+Z pops up the standard "Do you want to permanently delete this file?" confirmation dialog. Dolphin goes one step further, if you say yes to the confirmation dialog, it shows an additional one: "The file (copy) was copied from (original), but since the…
The KDE project does not produce perfect software, but they have attention to details. They are also eager to receive user feedback and to reverse decision after complains. They listen. The last post of Adventures in Linux and KDE is a good example of this: https://pointieststick.com/2023/05/11/plasma-6-better-defaul...
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?
Excel 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.
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.
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?
Excel 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.
Jetbrains IDEs have a "Local history" feature that is not well known. It watches local files and keeps a backup of previous versions of a file, independently from version control. This has saved me from a few accidental unrecoverable changes. git reflog is also your friend.
Iirc VS Code also added that feature last year. And Vim will also let you go back to any prior state as long as you still have the file open. You can go back to a specific date/time, revert the last 5 minutes etc.
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Excel 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.
Own C compiler? IIRC, that's not quite true. I worked on the C/C++ compiler team at Microsoft from 1991 to 2007, and I don't remember us producing a drop of the compiler just for Excel. I do think there was a special compiler flag for them, though, that fixed the order in which global variables were laid out to duplicate the source order. It was either Excel or Word that saved state by taking the addresses of the fir…
You'd think that with Windows having an install size of some 7GB that Microsoft would still have room for a tiny amount of code that would prevent this stupid behavior from happening. For decades, there have been other stupid annoyances with Windows Explorer such not providing options in 'Copy' to allow the automatic renaming of files in cases where the destination contains files of the same name. It stands to reason…
In a large company, just because you use something, develops it, and is on the specification process, it still doesn't mean you have the power to actually fix anything.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Own C compiler? IIRC, that's not quite true. I worked on the C/C++ compiler team at Microsoft from 1991 to 2007, and I don't remember us producing a drop of the compiler just for Excel. I do think there was a special compiler flag for them, though, that fixed the order in which global variables were laid out to duplicate the source order. It was either Excel or Word that saved state by taking the addresses of the fir…
They may be referring to a telephone version of the story that excel was originally compiled to p-code for compactness.
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Sheets or docs? Within one doc, and multiple sheets makes sense, I guess. Across docs doesn’t make sense to me.
Docs. 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 y…