Stale Value Formatting

I’m excited to announce that it is really annoying that your are pushing these updates as standard settings when installing or updating Excel. 

BAD IDEA to make it a default after an update without alerting those of us who use Excel and know how to use it Know what you have done to us. Like the "enhanced" Save As feature that is now a multiple keystroke/Mouse click (if you choose the right one first) operation rather than a simple text change Enter operation. 

Future changes - please let us know it is there IF WE WANT IT and how to disable it if we don't.

As an avid user of 3P reporting tools embedded in excel, auto recalculate is frequently turned on and off through my excel sessions.  These strike throughs are not helpful.  Should be off by default.

This "feature" is causing so many issues being on by default. Took days to figure out why there were strike-throughs all through a workbook but the formatting tab on the cell showed no strike-through. You could at least use an uncommon formatting style like someone else suggested a diagonal slash to alert the user or better still, leave this so called "feature" off by default.

Agreed; the formatting should have been visually different from custom formatting you can use in Excel. Turning it on by default was maybe not the best choice since most of the users have been using Excel for 20+ years and know how to handle stavle values. Luckily you can turn this option off now: Stale Value Formatting - Microsoft Support

I found this option irritating and immediately looked for a way to disable it.

I do not have the apparent option to disable it under "Calculation Options," but I found out that clicking the yellow triangle on a specific cell allows me to disable it for all other cells.

I found it irritating because I use Strikethough for other mechanisms in my models.

I cannot differentiate between my own and Excel's auto strikethrough, so I must disable it.

I concur that this might be a good option for others who forget to update their formulas manually (I cannot auto-calculate because every calculation takes around 1 minute), but a different approach should be considered.

I thought of the other options others proposed here, but every visible signal on a cell might be something someone uses already as part of "Conditional Formatting" or any other auto-marking (including font bolding/background/foreground colors and more), so I propose to point out with a yellow ribbon at the top, the same as with uneditable document or other notices that excel puts on file permissions/attributes, etc.

I can see use cases for this feature but it's fundamentally flawed for our default use of Microsoft Excel - i.e. we included data tables in models for scenario analysis then use Partial calculation by default to prevent them calculating every time an assumption is changed - which is very slow with data tables on.

In this use case, even when the model is set to the base case and all numbers in the spreadsheet are correct after updating an assumption, they still display as stale with strikethrough formatting, causing massive confusion for users who are reporting it to us as a bug.

Based on this, I cannot see us ever being able to use stale value formatting, so we'll need to turn it off on an application level by default.

JoeMcDaid can you please confirm that it is possible to turn off this feature by default, so that by default workbooks do not open with it turned on. Also, can this be done using VBA, on either a workbook or application level?

Personally, I think this feature should be turned off for all workbooks by default, as users who decide to turn it on (who I believe will be in the minority) can easily do so on a workbook-specific basis.

Most users will either leave calculation set to Automatic, in which case the feature is not relevant anyway. And those sophisticated enough to change their workbook calculation method to Partial or Manual will at that time be able to see the Stale Value Formatting option in the Calculation menu and decide what they'd like to do.

Turning it on by default is very presumptuous and confusing. We've already have dozens of inquiries about it from confused users...

Please advise, thanks.

Michael

A very useful option. I immediately found one function that constantly causes recalculation of all formulas in my basic template. I improved the performance of a typical financial model from 10 to 8.5 sec.

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.