51–60 of 110 posts
Undo Copy is a fine feature; there was a recent post here about clipboards and managing the cost of large copied objects. The problem here is that "undo copy" acted as "undo paste", a ridiculous bug.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Excel 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.
do you have some examples of that quirks?
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.
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Excel 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.
do you have some examples of that quirks?
I treat every file that's important to me the same when I have to edit it, I hit save first, then edit what needs attention. After making any change more then a few minutes of work, hit save. Undo is always the last option. I am a terribly slow typist, so this is a habit I formed many years ago.
This happened to me once. I thought I was doing ctrl-Z inside of an app I had been using up to a few minutes earlier, but I hadn't realised that instead a File Explorer window that was currently highlighted.
I treat every file that's important to me the same when I have to edit it, I hit save first, then edit what needs attention. After making any change more then a few minutes of work, hit save. Undo is always the last option. I am a terribly slow typist, so this is a habit I formed many years ago.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I 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.
Sheets or docs? Within one doc, and multiple sheets makes sense, I guess. Across docs doesn’t make sense to me.
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.
You know what's even more awesome? Select the desktop and press Ctrl+Z. The last thing you did in Explorer gets undone. Even if it was copying a 100GB file from a network share drive onto your local hard drive. Even if that was weeks ago. It's fantastic.
It should be noted that files can often be recovered if you notice soon after accidentally deleting them. You need a file recovery tool that understands your file format (Recuva is a pretty good free tool) but you can save yourself hours of work if you act quickly. These tools rely on the fact that Windows (and most other operating systems) don't zero out the filesystem when deleting files. This means that the file c…
I upvoted this response. It is very thorough and clear. (I can't attest to the veracity of the content but it seems quite logical.) I just wanted to say thanks for writing this. Clearly, these approaches, as you say, are not exactly beginner friendly, but it is great to know that they exist.