Create Every Day

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So I probably just missed the memo, but apparently at some point Microsoft decided that Excel was far too functional a product, and decided that it definitely needed to be broken. So they went ahead and made a few tweaks to ensure that everyone would suffer as much with Excel as with the rest of their product suite. (They are nothing if not consistent. 🙂 )

Without further ado, I give you the two worst software functionality regressions I’ve seen in recent memory:

1. You cannot open two spreadsheets at once.

Okay, some might argue that you can open multiple spreadsheets and then switch between them using a chooser, but the bottom line is that without going to extreme measures you can only have one Excel spreadsheet on your screen at a time. Because no one ever wanted to compare two documents…

Which leads me to:

2. You can’t open two spreadsheets with the same name.

Wait, is this the 80’s? Because I’m pretty sure we have folders to differentiate between “spreadsheet.xls” in two different places. But, alas, Excel doesn’t think that’s good enough. Want to open two versions of a document? You’re obviously doing the wrong thing according to the all-knowing Excel.

The worst part is that if I saw these behaviors in a brand new product I would NEVER buy that product. Yet Microsoft decided to ADD these behaviors to a long existing product, thus hampering it in a fundamental way without — as far as I can tell — adding any benefit.

Insane.