Stale Value Formatting

JoeMcDaid 

Strike through is not quickly/easily visible.

I would like to use a background color instead. Or a combination of background color and font color.

And I could choose a color which would stand out from the other colors in my spreadsheet.

This is a fantastic QOL (quality of life) improvement.  I have seen much confusion when a sheet has accidentally been changed to Manual calculation and people wondering why the numbers don't make sense.  TY TY TY.  That said, I agree it would be even better if the formatting was customizable.  Because many people already use strikethrough for other things they may confuse their own strike throughs with 'stale' strike throughs.  My preference 'default' would be a diagonal 'border' line on the cell (similar to strikethrough but more noticeable and in my experience less used.

I concur.

Let's say we'll have the strikethrough for a start, and in a near future, a fully customisable style associated to the workbook, for example.

That shouldn't be too complicated to implement...

That's great to know you are improving 44 years old functionalities.

A great new feature, a fast way to remind me when troubleshooting a spreadsheet that manual calculation is on. 

However, I also agree with the other comments about showing this in a different way, for example, filling the Cell in a different colour. 

Would the stale value tracking also work for RTD updates?

Many add-ins use RTD to implement async functions (instead of the built-in async mechanism) as well as the streaming updates. RTD-based functions need to be recalculated to update after the RTD signals new values are available, and this has always made it a bit confusing to use with 'manual' calculation mode.

govertvd :  What is RTD?  I could find no definition of this...  Thanks.

RTD is the "Real-Time Data" feed mechanism of Excel - it's very useful because of the way it integrates into the calculation engine, to allow push-based updates to a model. The RTD mechanism is well described here: Real-Time Data: Frequently Asked Questions | Microsoft Learn . There is also a video on YouTube that discussed RTD, with the same title as your question.

I am on a 365 beta channel but this has yet to appear.  Looks like an incremental roll out!

I have always found Manual Calculation to be a move of last resort.  It allows one to work with spreadsheets on the verge of collapse but at the cost of making reporting errors just about certain!

I would be happy with strike-through because it conveys the message clearly.  I have seen many spreadsheets that look like a Romany caravan at sunset but I do not think that competing with outlandish colours is worthwhile.

This is an excellent idea.  However, please use something other than strikethrough or colored cell filling.  Both of those are used for visual reasons by users. 

Alternative:

Please consider a different colored cell-corner triangle or a triangle in the middle of the top of the cell?  Those types of indicators would be consistent with other Excel UI in that they are driven by the content (comments, notes, possible errors, etc.), not part of content formatting.

Additional idea (of less worth than the colored corner triangle):

Might also provide a way to toggle on/off dimming out all the cells that are not stale, kind of like filtering by color but could not actually filter since cells could be all over the place.  But the idea is to click a button and the stale cells "pop" because the non-stale ones are all visually dimmed.  This argues against my preference for not coloring the cells, but think it would be valuable all the same.  Would be optional and the colored corner triangle would still be there.  

Thank you for reading and considering.