It has been nearly a year since an admin provided an update on the idea, “Restore MDI file handling (open all files in one window); Kill SDI (each spreadsheet opens in a seperate window)”

Please provide an update. Are you still accepting votes and considering restoration of MDI? Or, should we start looking for alternative products and pirate software to return to a more effective Excel version?

Again, here are the issues:

1. Stability
* I experience ~3X Excel crashes in 2016 (SDI) as compared to 2010 (MDI)
* Microsoft claims Excel is more stable, but my experience is the exact opposite

2. Screen Space / Real Estate
* Drastically reduced screen space when each workbook requires its own Ribbon, Quick Access Toolbar and Formula Bar
* 4 workbooks arranged in MDI – 896 visible cells; 4 workbooks arranged in SDI – 560 visible cells. This is a 63% reduction of space. This is not a linear relationship – you lose a larger amount of space with each additional workbook.
* At most, you can only work with 2 workbooks arranged Horizontally
* Arranging Vertically compresses the Ribbons to a point of complete uselessness
* Using multiple monitors should not be a solution for a poorly designed/downgraded product (SDI)

3. Toolbar to Workbook Confusion
* One Ribbon + Quick Access Toolbar + Formula Bar to control all workbooks is far less confusing (MDI)
* In SDI, each workbook remembers its own Ribbon setting creating additional work with redundant tasks. If you want to cycle through ~10 workbooks and change anything (Font, Page Layout, View), you must change the Ribbon on all 10 workbooks. Then, if you want to change something different, you must change each Workbook Ribbon again. This is massive waste of time/productivity
* WebEx screen sharing is virtually impossible and difficult to share a desired workbook (see J. Summie comment on 26-Oct-2018).

4. Navigation Between Workbooks
*a. With MDI, Ctl+Tab and Ctl+Shift+Tab worked flawlessly to cycle (forwards/backwards) through all open workbooks in a single instance of Excel. Using the same key combinations in SDI, I always see a screen “blip” of the last used non-Excel program – why? Even worse, sometimes it cycles a non-Excel program into the mix. When I’m trying to cycle between two workbooks, I do NOT want Windows Explorer thrown into the cycle!

5. Links (across workbooks)
* Ability to update links between workbooks is less flexible – sometimes you want links to update and sometimes you do not. In the past, we could easily open a new/separate instance of Excel and prevent links from updating between workbooks. Now, it is far more difficult to open a new/separate instance of Excel and it is more confusing to work between 2 instances

6. VBA – macro instability
* Running macros between multiple Excel Workbooks is not consistent in SDI – sometimes it will choose the next workbook, sometimes it does not. There are a lot of comments on this topic. I can only imagine the countless hours of VBA work that have been destroyed by the forced SDI

7. Closing Workbooks
* With MDI, you could close and save ALL workbooks with a couple of mouse clicks. In SDI, you must close and save each workbook individually. If you have ~10 large workbooks open at once this will require you to stay engaged in the process as you will be forced to wait for each workbook to save, so you can save and close the next workbook (another massive waste of time/productivity).

8. Opening Workbooks
*With MDI, we could count on workbooks to open and be sized where we had saved them. Now, they open in the exact same size and cascade – WHY? How would you like to go to your desk every day, only to find everything in a different drawer? That’s not where you put it last time you used it?... so why keep moving things on us?

9. Minimize/Maximize Workbooks
* Per Kary Williams post on 6-Aug-2018, working with 12 workbooks, with MDI you could use 3 mouse clicks, but with SDI it now takes 18 mouse clicks. Do you think the customer desires to use their mouse more? Kary was one of the lucky ones to revert back to 2010… but we’ll see her on this post in the future.

10. Excel alternative?
* 2010 is the only alternative at this point but will Microsoft will end support on 13-Oct-2020 (unfortunately, my I/T team will not put 2010 back on my PC)
* Office 2019 – I have not determined if MDI will be restored, but given the absence of feedback from John (the admin of this page) I am not optimistic.
* Other products (e.g. Google Sheets) requires a massive time investment to learn a new product. I’m not afraid to learn something new, but it is difficult to carve the time out of my day. Most of the products I’ve explored have some limitations/deal breakers compared to Excel. Even with the massive downgrade from MDI to SDI, it is still a better product in my opinion.

Every time (many days a year) I train people in Excel, someone ask why there is no button or shortcut to obtain a number format with "thousand separator and no decimals". At least - in northern Europe - this is the most common used number format. If "button-solution" not possible for Microsoft in order to have common buttons world-wide, at least a shortcut for this has been much appreciated. (Note that the current button for thousand separator and two decimals could not be used, though the alignment in that format are not disired/good and two decimals used).
Today I teach student to:
1) be quick to hit Ctrl+1 -- Tab - down arrow -- Tab -- downarrow -- Tab -- space -- Enter
2) Use my macro button - but hornestly, I hate to have macro for something common and simple due to lack of "undo".
3) Maybe some day (and I said that for 10 years now) Microsoft will do it :-)

When importing textfiles using Get and Transform I always struggle with one thing: I do not know upfront what the decimal separator and date order is of my text file. PQ only offers to choose a Locale, but it does not tell me what date order and syntax, nor which decimal separator belongs to this locale.
I'd love to be able to just choose the relevant separators and date order from a couple of drop-downs. I can almost always see which it is I need from the data, but I hardly ever know which locale belongs to the specific combination of separators in the file I happen to be looking at at the moment.

Hi, we experience an issue with MS Excel and the arabic language pack: User does right click on desktop and selects new Excel Workbook. New Workbook opens and first column A is on the right of the sheet and title of the sheet is arabic. If user just starts excel and creates a new workbook within excel all is working as expected, only if user selects new workbook from right click to desktop this happens. We installed the arabic language pack and this seems to affect the default template of excel.

The same issue is already reported for Office2007 and 2010: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_excel-mso_other-mso_2010/excel-sheets-display-in-arabic-side/26dafbd8-b4ed-4c67-b6e6-4b78a278c78f?messageId=206c87da-acc3-4122-8d17-f4a4e84cabcd&page=2

We opened ticket #12395436 at MS support and they agreed, this is by design but can be changed if this idea gets enough votes...
(Whyever they do not just work their tickets???)

However please vote to get this annoying stuff fixed finally.

Thx

Besides Office, Excel files can be created using numerous software tools. More often than not, batches of macro-enabled Excel files are processed with scripts for productivity purposes. However, VBA code signing cannot be part of an automated process, as it is a manual task that requires opening & saving the file in Excel.

This request is about creating a command line tool for signing Office files with a digital certificate, similar to MS SignTool.

In addition, the existing macro signing process in Office is not 100% compatible with Open XML specifications. I can clarify this statement in a private discussion with MS engineers due to its security implications

This has been a bug (in my mind) forever. For some reason, if you have an Excel shape nicely formatted and you go to link it to a cell to make the text dynamic, all the text formatting gets reset. This is really extremely annoying if you are creating a visually stimulating dashboard and want to duplicate a bunch of perfectly formatted shapes. Proceeding to link the shapes to various cells so that they display your data completely resets the formatting.

I created a VBA workaround to make it seem like the text format is retained, but this functionality should really be integrated into Excel itself.

Link to VBA workaround: https://www.thespreadsheetguru.com/blog/retain-font-formats-after-changing-excel-shapes-formula-link