[Getting OT] Excel annoyances (was re: [vox-tech] Oocalc question [...])

[Bill Kendrick]

On Wed, Dec 21, 2005 at 08:52:01AM -0500, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> 
> Just curious --- what bugs have you found?  I've always had good experiences
> with Excel.

A few beefs I have with Excel (from using it at work to construct
test logs for when we go to submit apps for certification) include:

* Inability to open a file (either via double-click or File->Open) if
  a cell happens to be in the middle of getting edited.  No errors or
  warnings; things just don't work.  Took me a while to figure out WTF was
  going on.

* Inability to open two different files if they happen to have the same
  file name.  (e.g., "c:\program\release_docs\version_1.0\test_log.xls" 
  and "c:\program\release_docs\version_1.1\test_logs.xls")

  It actually TELLS you that it cannot open two files with the same name,
  despite them being in different folders.  (Yeah, it mentions that
  "despite" bit in the error message!)  This seems like some kind of
  practical joke.

* Excel sheet scrolls and a different cell gets editing focus when you
  double-click a cell to edit it.  It seems to have something to do with
  whether the cell is at a certain position on the screen, and it wants to
  scroll it to the middle, or something, but somehow the wrong cell gets
  focus...  Very irritating.

* Standard MS Office trick where the app insists on un-minimizing its
  window, bringing it to the front and, hence, giving it focus.
  If I go to open a file (or multiple files), and then minimize the window
  while it's slowly loading them in the background, I want them to STAY
  minimized... I'm usually typing into a Notepad2 window, Putty shell,
  Cygwin window, or MS Visual Studio window.  Suddenly my spreadsheets and
  word processor documents end up with random typing at the top. >:^(

* Bizarre MDI-ish interface.  There's an "Excel" icon in the [Alt]+[Tab]
  display _as well as_ icons for each spreadsheet.  (I think Excel does
  this.  I know Adobe Acrobat Reader does.)  The problem here is that my
  sense of what window I'm "Alt-tabbing" to gets off by one, but only for
  the apps that act like this.  Grr!


<snip>
> I took a second to look through openoffice (which is a shell script).  I
> can't find how "oocalc" is any different from "oowriter" or any of the other
> "oo" scripts.  Actually, they are the same.  Wonder why they're not
> symlinks...

Heh, are they hard links? ;)


-- 
-bill!
bill at newbreedsoftware.com
http://www.newbreedsoftware.com/