This might be the funniest MS Office thing I have encountered yet:
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@c0dec0dec0de @aesthr @tante Yea, looks like they made Excel into a single context, with each open file in that one context. Which probably makes it easier to do cross-file stuff, but the cost in user surprise is way too high.
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This might be the funniest MS Office thing I have encountered yet:
Excel has global undo/redo, so if you work on multiple files and hit undo a few times. it may change things in a different file. Good luck reconstructing that, if you don't immediately notice.
An absurd design decision imo
I understand why, and if you don’t want to be traumatised, I suggest you stop reading now.
A spreadsheet is not actually the document unit for Excel. Any open sheet can refer to cells in any other open sheet (hmm, I wonder if anyone has exploited that with sheets that fetch from external data sources to extract other information). By default, any cell reference is in the current sheet, but you can include other files by name and their cells will be used but only if they are open. This means that any editing operation may affect any other open sheets and so, logically, it follows that undo should apply to the document (all open sheets) and not simply one sheet.
This is also why Excel does not let you open two sheets with the same file name at the same time. If you do, cross-sheet references would be ambiguous. Remember, they don’t refer to files as paths or some kind of unique document identifier, they reference other sheets by file name from the set of open files.
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This might be the funniest MS Office thing I have encountered yet:
Excel has global undo/redo, so if you work on multiple files and hit undo a few times. it may change things in a different file. Good luck reconstructing that, if you don't immediately notice.
An absurd design decision imo
@aesthr ZOMGWTFBBQ.....
How is this shit the "standard"?
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This might be the funniest MS Office thing I have encountered yet:
Excel has global undo/redo, so if you work on multiple files and hit undo a few times. it may change things in a different file. Good luck reconstructing that, if you don't immediately notice.
An absurd design decision imo
@aesthr
It should be on just the document that has focus. -
@tofticles @aesthr It possibly made more sense back when it was an MDI application. Having GUIs make logical sense stopped being a design requirement around Windows 8 at the latest.
Even in MDI, I'd have assumed that undo was only for whichever sheet/workbook I was in...
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This might be the funniest MS Office thing I have encountered yet:
Excel has global undo/redo, so if you work on multiple files and hit undo a few times. it may change things in a different file. Good luck reconstructing that, if you don't immediately notice.
An absurd design decision imo
@aesthr perfect complement to the feature where moving a picture slightly reformats the whole room and starts fires in the next town
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This might be the funniest MS Office thing I have encountered yet:
Excel has global undo/redo, so if you work on multiple files and hit undo a few times. it may change things in a different file. Good luck reconstructing that, if you don't immediately notice.
An absurd design decision imo
@aesthr wtf
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This might be the funniest MS Office thing I have encountered yet:
Excel has global undo/redo, so if you work on multiple files and hit undo a few times. it may change things in a different file. Good luck reconstructing that, if you don't immediately notice.
An absurd design decision imo
They could just stop changing the fucking program
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@kayla I tried typst for scientific writing and it's just not there yet. My LaTeX boilerplate isn't complex at all but it felt like a monumental task to replicate the output of that in typst
@aesthr It took me some afternoons, but in the end, I understood Typst better than I ever understood my LaTeX templates which were full of stuff I found on obscure discussion forums and stack overflow and I was never sure why it works the intended way, especially in the area of handling czech characters

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This might be the funniest MS Office thing I have encountered yet:
Excel has global undo/redo, so if you work on multiple files and hit undo a few times. it may change things in a different file. Good luck reconstructing that, if you don't immediately notice.
An absurd design decision imo
@aesthr Next month Microsoft will release a feature that finds Word documents written by other people at your org who relied on the numbers in your spreadsheet. Then, if you undo in your spreadsheet, Copilot will go adjust the text their documents too.
(And now you have to go do an internet search and try to figure out whether I made that up or if it’s real!)
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This might be the funniest MS Office thing I have encountered yet:
Excel has global undo/redo, so if you work on multiple files and hit undo a few times. it may change things in a different file. Good luck reconstructing that, if you don't immediately notice.
An absurd design decision imo
@aesthr @FreakyFwoof This is why the tools should definitely have an "undo history” or show you what you are undoing!
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@aesthr @FreakyFwoof This is why the tools should definitely have an "undo history” or show you what you are undoing!
@vick21 @FreakyFwoof fun fact: Excel does have that these days. But it's not super helpful because it's a long list of changes across multiple documents but each change just says the cell coordinates, not the document it occurred in
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Even in MDI, I'd have assumed that undo was only for whichever sheet/workbook I was in...
@tofticles @aesthr I should've been clearer, by "more" I didn't mean it actually made sense, only that it was marginally less stupid.
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This might be the funniest MS Office thing I have encountered yet:
Excel has global undo/redo, so if you work on multiple files and hit undo a few times. it may change things in a different file. Good luck reconstructing that, if you don't immediately notice.
An absurd design decision imo
@aesthr in like 30 years of using Word I have never noticed this! Is it new?
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This might be the funniest MS Office thing I have encountered yet:
Excel has global undo/redo, so if you work on multiple files and hit undo a few times. it may change things in a different file. Good luck reconstructing that, if you don't immediately notice.
An absurd design decision imo
@aesthr This has given me countless days of swearing. It is no fun at all watching complex charts or long formula strings vanishing before your eyes.
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@aesthr I remember working in QA for Microsoft on MS project ages ago. We had to take direction from Office on features including the UI. I was testing undo redo in Project and logged bugs about it undoing things in other docs silently. I was told that's the way Office did it, so it was by design.
I tried. I hate that design decision to this day.
Thank you for trying.
The decision actually made me close all other documents before using undo function in Excel, just to be sure. Definitely reduces usability.
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This might be the funniest MS Office thing I have encountered yet:
Excel has global undo/redo, so if you work on multiple files and hit undo a few times. it may change things in a different file. Good luck reconstructing that, if you don't immediately notice.
An absurd design decision imo
@aesthr @FreakyFwoof I just ran into this yesterday. It’s.a good thing I caught it in time, and I could fix it by just hitting control+y enough times.
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This might be the funniest MS Office thing I have encountered yet:
Excel has global undo/redo, so if you work on multiple files and hit undo a few times. it may change things in a different file. Good luck reconstructing that, if you don't immediately notice.
An absurd design decision imo
@aesthr
Do Word and PowerPoint also have global undo/redo? Would be wild for different programs in the Office suite to have different behaviors, but at this point it wouldn't surprise me. -
S strit@mastodon.social shared this topic
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This might be the funniest MS Office thing I have encountered yet:
Excel has global undo/redo, so if you work on multiple files and hit undo a few times. it may change things in a different file. Good luck reconstructing that, if you don't immediately notice.
An absurd design decision imo
I am professionally certified to use Microsoft Office (have the papers to prove it and all) and if you can believe it, this is somehow not the most batshit insane design decision that this accursed suite has.