Excel Beta 2010

I’ve got Excel 2010 Beta installed on my PC at work, partly to play around with it, partly because I need some­thing to do all the myr­iad spread­sheets I’m required to do.

As before, Excel 2010 allows you to open mul­ti­ple work­books with that mad­den­ingly weird pseudo-MDI inter­face that is always a lit­tle jar­ring. I know the point of the taskbar short­cuts, and I know how they’re imple­ment­ing it. Doing so changes the taskbar from a win­dow man­age­ment tool to a doc­u­ment man­age­ment tool — albeit incom­pletely because the same doesn’t apply to sub-documents on non-Microsoft appli­ca­tions. In the end, it’s just an irri­tat­ing adjust­ment from a work­ing men­tal model to a bro­ken one.

But that’s not actu­ally the stu­pid part. No, the stu­pid part is that there’s a sin­gle, global undo his­tory. Yes, that’s right, all your doc­u­ments share undo his­tory. In prac­tice, this means you can use­fully edit one spread­sheet at a time. It assumes that your life is a sin­gle stream of changes, and you want to rewind that life to a par­tic­u­lar indis­tinct place in time. In my own usage, that isn’t the case. My life is a series of par­al­lel streams of changes, and I want (read: need) the abil­ity to rewind any one of them to any given point in time, and Excel has appar­ently bro­ken this on pur­pose — at least, I don’t remem­ber this mad­ness from 2007.

It’s hard to talk about this with­out also dis­cussing the Ribbon, and why the sit­u­a­tions are dif­fer­ent. Non-geeks who got used to muscle-memory-ing1 through the old Excel were upset with the Ribbon, because it meant that their care­fully crafted train­ing was use­less — it’s like being switched to Dvorak. I per­son­ally like the Ribbon, because it let some­one like myself, who’d never used Excel for any­thing before 2007, learn and use the tool. You break how peo­ple find fea­tures, more peo­ple can find features.

But this isn’t the case with break­ing how a par­tic­u­lar fea­ture works. IMO, that’s just dumb.

  1. it’s a word because I say so.

5 Responses

  1. kj says:
    2010-03-20 at 5:53 pm

    Try run­ning sep­a­rate instances of excel.exe — i.e. don’t click on xls files, but run Excel and then Open.

  3. wyrfel says:
    2010-03-20 at 6:46 pm

    LOL…
    …and good words about the Ribbon. It’s what i find the one respectable move MS did in the last cou­ple of years. Still dis­ap­pointed with OOo stick­ing to con­ser­vatism when they had the bet­ter ground to inno­vate at 2.0 and 3.0 mile­stones. For once, MS did the right thing (not say­ing the Ribbon as is might be ‘the right thing’; but to make a bold move in Office UI def­i­nitely was).

  5. James Cape says:
    2010-03-21 at 11:58 am

    Perhaps it’s a sub­tle attempt to destroy multitasking?

    More likely they’re think­ing “how do I fire the guy who sold me on this with­out look­ing bad?”

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