Monday, April 21, 2008

Excel WTF

This is an old one, but I'm always stunned by the fact that a major application such as Excel still has issues like this. I'm trying to view two copies of the same file, located in different folder (I want to check a specific cell to see if it was changed). For some obscure reason, Excel can't handle two simultaneously opened files with the same name, even if they reside in different folder (not that there is any option for them to do reside in the same folder, but that's beside the point).

"A document with the name 'blablabla.xls' is already open. You cannot open two documents with the same name, even if the documents are in different folders. To open the second document, either close the document that's currently open, or rename one of the documents."

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It was a strategic choice: either let VBA users call up a workbook by its name, or don't. They went with the former, and as a result their object model indexes the Application.Workbooks collection with the worksheet name. You can't have two members of a VB collection with the same name or you get a hashtable collision.

They could get around this any number of ways, all of which result in a steeper learning curve for the VBA user.

But yeah, it drives me nuts too, when I have 52 payrolls to consolidate, all in their own folder, all named "Deposit.xls", for two dozen clients every year.