Excel 2004: Poor responsiveness for text alignment button in Formatting Palette

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Microsoft
May 31st, 2005 • 4:38 am

A while ago, I wrote about the fact that the text alignment buttons in Excel’s Formatting Palette are still very confusing indeed. But that’s not the only problem.

Let’s say, for example, that you have a column in an Excel spreadsheet in which some of the cells have left-aligned text and some have centered text. If you then select the column heading at the very top of the column and click once on the “Align Center” button in the Formatting Palette, Excel… left-aligns the text in the cell.

If you click on the “Align Center” button a second time, then Excel does finally centers the text in all the cells.

However, if the time elapsed between the first click and the second click is too short, Excel only registers one click. So not only do you have to click on the button twice to get the desired effect, but you can’t click too fast; otherwise, Excel won’t register your second click.

Since double-clicking on such buttons doesn’t have any meaning, this should not happen, no matter how short the time between the two clicks is. Yet it does happen if the time is too short. (Don’t ask me exactly how short. Only Microsoft knows.) Yet another irritant.

It gets even more interesting if you investigate what happens when you click twice on the corresponding formatting buttons in Word 2004… See this item.


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