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 has WHAT?! :blobcatfearful: :blobcatdead:
@aesthr Yeah, copying/cutting/pasting between files is also weirdly
delicate.
@florisbiskamp @aesthr
Absolute villain about whether pasting will/ will not be formatted or if it is still willing to use what was copied
The lengths Microsoft has gone to avoid doing the simplest thing, a shortcut key for paste without formatting that is consistent, is antagonistic
@florisbiskamp @aesthr Global undo is the worst!
And then yeah, I have a worksheet that gives a bunch of viewpoints on some specific data. Added a new sheet for a new viewpoint, copied it to another worksheet (different raw data, same design), and they added named variables pointing at the first worksheet, shadowing over the ones that existed already. I knew I had to copy/paste over the values in the formula since those got changed, but took me a minute to figure out I had to delete the names that had been added to the name manager too.
Jul 8, 2026, 1:15 PM@aesthr What
@schratze exactly my reaction
@aesthr Hmm, doesn't seem to be the case with Excel 2019 at least I had two windows with two different files open, and undo redo is localised to each of them.
@aesthr I use excel daily, and I hate this "Feature".
I only want to modify the excel in the active screen, if it does anything else it's wrong.
This site has some options for work arounds, but the best one the registry edit can't be done on corporate machines.
https://spreadsheetplanet.com/open-multiple-instances-excel/
@aesthr oh gods
@aesthr And auto-save is on by default, right?
@aesthr oh I'm well aware of this... believe me!
(in the same vein, Word managed to eat a day's work updating my final thesis - including backup copies I was making *and even the original which I had clicked to save* not once, not twice, but three times! That's when I pivoted to learning LaTeX.
Jul 8, 2026, 2:08 PM@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 @kayla my LaTeX days are long gone, unfortunately. Once I left uni in the early 2000s I went straight into writing certification documents and research reports for a very large manufacturer - which all had to be in Word, of course.
That client has since switched to Google, while my own company is soldiering on with all things Microsoft. Blecchh.
Needless to say I make all my own notes in text files with Notepad++...
Jul 8, 2026, 9:29 PM@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 😅
@aesthr
it has glo-
and the economy-
at this point just uninvent computers outside of science and weird nerds :neocat_googly_shocked:
Jul 8, 2026, 2:39 PM@ozzelot@mstdn.social @aesthr@wandering.shop this would fix everything for sure
brotherhood of steel has entered the chatoh no
@aesthr Excel used to have a multiple document interface (MDI) When undo redo was rolled out, it was visually and logically associated with the single application and applied to all of the multiple documents open within the application. So visually, it was more logical back then that you would expect undo to be at the application level as all open docs were visually in the one app. There was some logic to supporting undo/redo at the application level, to be able to cleanly undo changes which imported or linked data across multiple docs. But visually, when they changed to an SDI it was very unobvious that that this is how undo would work and although they changed to the SDI with a menu per doc they left the single undo-redo stack implementation from the MDI. Arguments would’ve been backwards compatibility and being able to cleanly undo changes that spanned documents.
@MatthewPCooke @aesthr Excel is still plagued by the fact it was that stupid MDI interface when it started. It will make the illusion of multiple windows if you open multiple documents, but if you move one of those windows, all the others will move to the same location, so if you want two spreadsheets side by side you have to manually open two copies of Excel.
@Canageek @MatthewPCooke @aesthr All Office programs were MDI, but Excel was always special (the global Undo thing didn't apply to any other program, nor did a bunch of other things that Excel still does weirdly, especially when working with multiple documents).
@jernej__s @MatthewPCooke @aesthr Good point, I have no idea why they have not undone this ridiculous choice in the meantime.
I know Raymond Chen has been annoyed by it breaking the various Windows user interface guidelines
@Canageek @MatthewPCooke @aesthr It does looks like it was fixed at some point – I can't reproduce this with 365 any more.
@jernej__s @MatthewPCooke @aesthr incorrect, I just verified it on the version we use at work. you have to open one instance of excel, and then open a second document either by using open or by clicking the new document button.
If you open Excel twice then you don't have this problem.
@jernej__s @Canageek @aesthr to be fair, I have genuinely seen a lot of inter-document linking and data loading amongst finance teams where as word documents are usually separate. That might also go some way to explaining why word went SDI about 15 years before Excel…
Jul 8, 2026, 2:19 PM@aesthr oh yes I have experienced that numerous times (I work with Excel a lot)
@aesthr
Yeah I've had annoying encounters with that feature a few times and it's never felt like it should work like that. Wild choice.
Agreed. My programming editor (I use vi, BTW!) also has global undo, but on a per-file basis. So if I keep hitting undo or ctrl-Z, then it will wind back changes to this file only. Thankfully!
Jul 8, 2026, 3:44 PM@aesthr what the... what th... what!!
*gives Microsoft an extremely dirty look*
@aesthr what the
nO
@aesthr in what world would you need this feature
@aesthr
maybe we should "ctrl-Z" MicroSoft right 😩
Jul 8, 2026, 4:14 PM@aesthr casual reminder, ms office is not a thing anymore. they've killed the brand. it's now "microsoft copilot" or some bullshit like that.
Jul 8, 2026, 5:15 PM@ar here's 5 pedantry points for you, happy?
Jul 8, 2026, 5:33 PM@aesthr hey, it just shows how little ms cares about this thing as a product. functionality doesn't matter, it needs to promote slop.
@aesthr WHAT?!
@aesthr 🤯
@aesthr yes this is a mad thing. I nearly fell for it just yesterday!
@aesthr LibreOffice.
@c_merriweather why is there always someone who thinks this basic-ass "advice" is warranted or even applicable? Do you seriously think nobody has heard of libreoffice before?
I know. I use it every day at home. But my workplace won't switch to it anytime soon so your comment is utterly useless noise
I hope you feel really good about being that annoying type of nerd
@aesthr Yes. A soon-to-be 68 y.o. nerd.🙂
@c_merriweather you dipshits are what's keeping more people from using open source alternatives to commercial software simply by being obnoxious and arrogant about it whenever you get a chance. great job, now fuck off
Jul 8, 2026, 5:24 PM@c_merriweather Broomstick.
@aesthr Yup, drives me crazy. 😑
@aesthr effects of not checking ai generated code . I have this theory - i have observed this multiple times - AI cannot understand objects and its state.
Thereby commits such errors.
@Debdip_KV nope, this behavior has been in excel for way longer than that
Jul 8, 2026, 4:57 PM@aesthr Gods. This explains -so- much.
I thought Excel was broken, somehow.. (well, it is, but that is beside -this- point). Who in their right mind ok'ed this..
@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.
Jul 8, 2026, 8:03 PMEven 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.
I think you meant "funniest" in a different sense that I first thought.
@aesthr Yup
Help, I hit undo too many times and it uninstalled Nesticle from Windows 95
@aesthr I might well have done this accidentally at work before and not realised. not that undo does much any more in work spreadsheets anyway, someone's learned what macros are and is making it our problem
@aesthr Wait, What now?
*Face Palm*