7 Excel Bugbears I’d Love Microsoft to Fix

Not everything is ACE when it comes to Excel…

Whether you’re just discovering Excel Ace for the first time, or you’ve been reading my articles for a while, I’m sure you’ll have picked up on the fact that I LOVE Excel.

But it’s not always rainbows and sunshine – as hard as I find it to admit, Excel does have one or two shortcomings. They’re few and far between (I hasten to add), and only very minor, but when you’re using Excel as regularly as me, you soon start to notice where improvements could be made.

In this article (which is a different direction from my usual pieces) I’m going to unpack 7 of my personal bugbears.

I must stress, these are all my personal opinions and suggestions on where I’d like to see Microsoft improve their offering in the future. Despite them being slight niggles, I still absolutely adore Excel and I don’t think there’s anything that can or will change that any time soon!

My 7 Excel Bugbears

1. The (over)protected ‘Sort’ function

When you ‘Protect’ a sheet in Excel, there’s a list of things you can ‘allow’ users to do while the sheet is protected.

On this list is the ‘Sort’ function…

You might be wondering what my problem with this is – sorting a list shouldn’t be an issue, right? The problem isn’t with ‘Sort’ being on the list, it’s the fact that even when it’s selected, it still doesn’t work!

2. Inequality in operating systems

When a sheet’s ‘Protected’ on a Mac (and you should know I am not a Mac fan), the sheet name includes a small padlock to the right to indicate this.

This makes it super clear and easy to see whether or not the sheet is protected.

On Windows, we don’t get the padlock, so we have to find other ways to check if the sheet is protected, which are a little more long-winded. I wish it could just be kept simple.

NOTE: Microsoft did add the padlock for Windows users in 2020, which made me so happy! Sadly, it was short-lived as they received complaints about the sheet name being too long so they removed it after about 3 weeks, and it never made a comeback!?

3. Counting is as easy as…

The COUNT formula only counts numbers. That means that to be able to COUNT cells containing text, characters, dates (or a combination), you need to use the COUNTA formula.

I personally think it would have been better to make the COUNT formula, count anything, and then have a special formula to count only numbers (i.e. COUNTNUM).

4. Let’s be specific

The Formula Wizard isn’t very clear in its explanation as to what to include in each argument.

In the ‘Sum’ wizard, this is the explanation for what to input to the ‘Number1’ box:

This isn’t very clear at all and doesn’t tell the user what to enter (which is incredibly unhelpful, especially for new Excel users).

In the COUNTIF formula (and some others), it’s perfectly clear that we should enter a range of cells:

Why can’t they all provide the same level of detail?!

5. Everything you need is in a cell to the left

In the description of the VLOOKUP formula, it uses the word ‘leftmost’ to describe the first column of the selected range. If you’re not familiar with VLOOKUP, this can easily be misinterpreted as meaning the leftmost column of the sheet.

Wouldn’t it have been easier to just use the word ‘first’, just as it does in the description of ‘Lookup_value’ here:

Who has ever used the word ‘leftmost’ anyway?!

6. Paste Special playing favourites

In the Paste Special menu, we get the option to paste ‘Column Widths’ but NOT ‘Row Heights’.

I have no idea why this is, but I’d love to have the option to paste Row Widths too.

7. It’s about time Conditional Formatting had a facelift

The last time there was a new icon added to Conditional Formatting was way back in 2010, with the cute little Gold Stars, but no changes since:

I’d really love Microsoft to update this list again (it has been over a decade after all) to reflect some more modern emojis and symbols. I’d personally really love to see these: