DIE!, foul creature, DIE!
I’m typing email addresses into a spreadsheet. Excel helpfully turns them into hyperlinks that automatically start up a “new message” in Outlook if I click on them. They reformat themselves into unreadable 7.5-point, blue, underlined type.
I never asked Excel to do any of this.
After some investigation, I found out that the auto-correct options have been moved to “proofing” which is buried under the “Excel Options” button which is well isolated from the flow of menu items, under the new “Office” icon in the upper-left of the screen. I drilled down and killed the offending feature, but IT WON’T DIE!!! I’m still getting tiny hyperlinks when I type in email addresses.
It’s probably because the spreadsheet was created in Excel 2003 – not that I care about the reason for Microsoft’s incompetence – but when will they get it through their heads that fancy isn’t necessarily better, and just because they can dream up a function is not a sign from heaven that we want it in our software. I have seen many users reduced to screaming rage by the counterintuitiveness of their uncooperative applications. Sometimes the voice is my own… it is difficult to be certain.
It’s nice to know I’m not the only annoyed by that feature. In fact nearly all of the auto-correct functions annoy the hell out of me.
BTW, not sure if it works the same in Office07 or Excel, but in Word 03 you can right click on hyperlinks and remove them from the context menu.
I tried that, and it brought up a dialog box that indicated an empty hyperlink but no way to remove it. It is probably a “compatibility mode” thing.
Crappy software at high prices, and people line up to buy it.
Perhaps this will help, but don’t count on it.
http://www.visar.com/AssistedSuicide.html
That was damn funny!!