Microsoft Excel - Is it possible to design anything more annoying?

Each day Excel finds a whole brand new way to wind me up. It’s like it knows me and it’s trying to make me scream at it. I’m ranting here, so I hope some of it is coherent! Things that annoy me include (and are in no way limited to):

  • That multiple clipboard thing that pops up and JUST GETS IN THE DAMN WAY ALL THE TIME.
  • It crashes if you undo too far. Far too often.
  • There’s no keyboard shortcut to edit the contents to a cell. Yay, you can press F2… Thanks Cesar!
  • If you go to double click on a cell to edit it and miss slightly it sends you to the bottom of the file. Why?!? Why could anyone consider that to be useful behaviour.
  • Sometimes it sends you to the top too!
  • It is near impossible to click in a cell that contains a hyperlink that you actually didn’t want to be clickable in the first place.
  • It has a completely bizarre window / task bar management that no other application implements… including the rest of the Office suite meaning that you close one sheet and they all damn close, Word doesn’t do this. Outlook doesn’t do this. Powerpoint does, but then you’re under no illusion that you’re actually just closing that single window because it doesn’t spawn another task bar tab.
  • If I’ve got a spreadsheet with multiple worksheets and I want to save out as a tab delimited file DON’T RENAME THE DAMN TAB that I’ve saved as the file name DON’T LOSE SIGHT of the fact that there are other tabs open - it’s okay to assume that I’m still editing a whole workbook so when I press ctrl-s to save don’t FORGET WHO YOU ARE!!!
  • Why can’t I save out all the worksheet tabs as separate tab files/csvs in one go?
  • Why are you the only application that gets confused by XDesk and other virtual desktop tools that actually make windows manageable.
  • Why when I highlight some text to end of the sentance in that cell do you hightlight to the end of the cell? I don’t what anything other than what I’ve highlighted - you can leave the rest of the cell alone. Still, at least you’re better than Word when it comes to cell highlighing when it comes to pre-assuming what you actually meant!
  • Why can’t I zoom to more than 100% using ctrl and the mouse wheel?
  • Why do you automatically lock the file from being edited by me because someone, somewhere else has the file open and has gone home for the day. There’s much better ways to ensure files don’t get overwritten.
  • Why can I copy and paste as much as I like, but if I cut something out I can only paste it once?
  • Why can’t I continue to edit the document when something as simple as a find in document dialogue is open?

Why do you hate me?

If, by some off reason, you’re reading this and you can think of more ways to annoy myself in Excel, please do let me know!

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