Mac Forum / Applications / Excel / June 2006

Thanks for the answer, Bob.

Unfortunately, I think you're wrong. Twice.

To begin with, there's no way to customize an action like
"option-click". The "Customize Keyboard" command allows to configure
shortcuts formed by key combinations only. You can't configure mouse
shortcuts.

And, more important, this is not standard behavior. It CAN'T be a
standard behavior. If this is a standard behavior, it's one of the most
stupid UI implementations ever!

First off: in a spreadsheet, an operation like "Insert cell/shift
[down|right]" is extremely dangerous to be activated by such a simple
action as "option-click". An "Insert..." command ALWAYS have to ask the
user what to do with the the other cells (shift down, shift right,
insert entire row, insert entire column). If this is the case and the
application can't decide it for itself, why does Excel offer a handy
shortcut to "Insert cell, shift down", a potentially destructive
operation?

Second: if this is a standard behavior, why is there no mention to it
in the help pages? Why don't we find any mention of this anywhere in
the Web? Why doesn't the Windows version of Excel perform an "Insert
cell/shift down" operation when we Alt-click a cell?

Finally: in Mac OS, option-clicking a window is a standard behavior
that means: bring this window to front while hiding the previous active
window. If you combine this action with the "standard behavior" of
Excel, we end up with lots of inserted cells in a spreadsheet every
time we switch windows between Excel and another application (or even
another Excel window) using the option-click method.

Unfortunately, I learned this lesson the hard way. This stupid
"standard behavior" cost me an entire day of hard work. In a
spreadsheet with 850 rows and 20 columns, I had to do the operations
below in every column, one by one:

* SORT THE COLUMN in alphabetical order
* copy the entire column
* paste the column in BBEdit
* in BBEdit, perform a series of grep operations to clean up the text
* still in BBEdit, do the most time-consuming task of the job:
proofread the entire text
* copy the text from BBEdit, cleaned up and proofread
* and paste it again in Excel

At some point of the job, though, I may have switched from another
window to the spreadsheet option-clicking the Excel window. This action
inserted a blank cell in the spreadsheet, shifting the remaining rows
down.

I didn't notice that.

You can imagine what happened after several "Sort" commands: the rows
and columns got out of sync. And I only noticed this problem the next
day, when I saw that one column had 851 lines instead of 850. Bottom
line: I had to do the entire work again.

And all this chaos was triggered by a mere "option-click" acton...

I hope you now understand why this is a bug and not a standard feature.

I've send a feedback to Microsoft regarding this issue, but I'm not
sure the messages sent via their Feedback form are effectively read by
someone. So I ask you to redirect this message to the proper
department. As an MVP, I guess your messages are taken more seriously
by them.

Regards,

João Carlos de Pinho
São Paulo, Brazil