[cka]

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]

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.

[strictfp]

They could solve that by keeping track of references and asking you though.

[jtbayly]

Sheets or docs?

Within one doc, and multiple sheets makes sense, I guess.

Across docs doesn’t make sense to me.

[tragomaskhalos]

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.

[philistine]

This 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.

[philiplu]

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 first and last global variables of interest, then dumping all memory in that range to disk. The flag was something like -bzalign. The bz stood for Bozo, which hints at the compiler team's thoughts on the practice.

[PhilipRoman]

One 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.

[taneq]

I'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]

All of that sounds perfectly sensible.

[tinus_hn]

I 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]

They fixed that "same file name" annoyance? We have Office 2021(?) at work and it still has that "feature".

[dspillett]

That must be a very recent change - I'm sure I've run into that limitation not more than a few months ago.

[scrlk]

You can work around this by starting a fresh instance of Excel. Run -> "Excel.exe /x"

[kevin_thibedeau]

Excel is an MDI app pretending to have one document per window. It still has the unified undo buffer from that architecture.

[weinzierl]

I 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]

Excel is the archetypal backwards compatible program.

[AraceliHarker]

Since Windows 11 includes extensive telemetry, it is possible that Microsoft intentionally designed it this way for user productivity.

[masfuerte]

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.