User Forms not displaying correctly in MS365 Excel for Mac
I need some help. I developed a simple budgeting system in Excel many years ago, which revolves around a spreadsheet with sheets for each account. I built three user forms to allow for a Deposit (which is distributed among the accounts based on data in the summary sheet); Single Entry (which can be either a credit to or debit from a specific account), and a Transfer (which takes an amount from one account and transfers it to another. Here are pictures of the three User Forms as displayed on my Windows machines (whether running Office 2019 Excel or MS 365 Excel for Windows): The key is that the Single Entry and Transfer forms display a list of accounts that can be selected from. The problem I am having is that when I try to do this in MS 365 FOR MAC, the lists of accounts are not displayed and cannot be selected from (only a blank box appears). The Deposit form, which has no list to select from, works perfectly fine, so it's not a general problem with macros. Fortunately, even after the file is opened and edited on Mac, it can be reopened back on a Windows machine and still works properly there. I know that there are limitations in Excel for Mac with regard to building User Forms, but I didn't see anything specifically described that would create this situation. I'm wondering if perhaps it might be a font issue?? I built these years ago and have used them for many years without problems. I'm pretty sure I can come up with another way to do this, but I was hopeful that someone out there might have a simple solution for me?? I moved from Office 2019 to MS 365 specifically to allow me to use a Mac, so this is really throwing a monkey wrench in my plans!!! Thanks to all for your consideration!!Excel Nested Arrays: Find the Nesting Depth of Uniform and Ragged Arrays ARRDEPTH() & ISRAGGED()
Hey everyone! I’ve been diving deep into Excel’s new nested arrays features lately, and I absolutely love the flexibility they bring to data structuring. However, managing them can get a bit tricky, so I figured I’d build some specialized tools to handle them seamlessly. Public Interfaces & Arguments =ISRAGGED(array) Argument Description Default Behavior array Target nested structure to validate. Required =ARRDEPTH(array, [is_ragged]) Argument Description Default Behavior array Target nested structure to measure. Required [is_ragged] TRUE: Scans all branches for the deepest path. FALSE: Speed test on the first path only. FALSE (Omitted) TL;DR (What makes it tick): Function Name Type What It Does ARRDEPTH Public UI Returns nesting depth. Supports deep checking or fast linear testing. ISRAGGED Public UI Structural validator. Returns TRUE if array branches have uneven nesting. ANALYZE_NESTING Hidden Core Engine Multi-process recursive parser that tracks tree structure geometries. LINEARDEPTH Hidden Utility High-speed depth checker that evaluates the first element path exclusively. You can get both functions from my GitHub Gist: https://gist.github.com/Medohh2120/9cdf939036942c9672c57ccd6de696d3
20 YEARS LATER BUT DEFINITELY NOT 20 YEARS GREATER!
I'm so disgusted with you Microsoft. After 20 years of learning how to use Excel moderately well you now force me out of Excel 2003 which you have bastardised so much it's now impossible to use! You've changed it so much it's useless to me! The lack of respect shown for your clients/customers who put in the time to learn how to use it now find ourselves with an unworkable system. This is an absolute disregard and waste of our time. I have wasted this weekend and been so turned off attempting to achieve what I had completed in 2003 Excel which I stayed with due to the decision YOU MADE to 'choke' Excel in accessing and using RAM - without telling us - which decided me to stay with 2003 for 20 years!! Good old faithful! But now your updates have crashed it so that I can no longer use it. I have had to change to 365 which is now the most screwed up convoluted and ridiculous program by comparison that it is a waste of time to have to re-learn a program which I could already use effectively. You might think 365 is a jewel but everyone I know who uses it think it's junk and hates it with a vengeance. Most would happily go back but instead we'll probably just complain and head for Linux instead. They care to have happy users! You don't even answer so I'm even unsure as to why I waste my time except that I am so angry I need to vent my disagreement. My projects are now stymied after 20 years work thanks to your stupidity, ignorance and lack of thought for your world-based users! And your charts, what used to work may as well be written in a foreign language...and WHY! I wish I could let loose and tell what I really think, but I'd have to drop my standards so far that even I would be disgusted by it! Not happy Microsoft! I'D HAPPILY PAY YOU TO STAY AWAY FROM ME AND LEAVE ME WITH MY OLD PROGRAM!Excel pivot chart's secondary axis disappears after parameter in chart is filtered at slicer
Hi, A pivot chart on Sales (primary y axis) and Rate (secondary y axis) is plotted against time (X axis). Area parameter is part of the underlying dataset, but not plotted in same chart. When Area or Rate is filtered at respective slicer, the secondary y axis disappears i.e. pivot chart resets to having only primary y axis How may I keep the secondary y axis after filtering? Thank you.Excel can still use legacy “Move and Size with Cells” checkboxes — but can no longer create them
Excel Can Still Use “Move and Size with Cells” Form Checkboxes — But It Can No Longer Create Them A reproducible Excel compatibility regression hiding inside legacy Form Controls For years, I have used Excel workbooks containing hundreds of Form Control checkboxes attached to product rows. These checkboxes behaved exactly as you would expect: - change the row height, and the checkbox stays inside that row; - filter the worksheet, and the checkbox disappears together with its product; - remove the filter, and the checkbox returns to the correct row; - no overlapping controls; - no “click one checkbox, activate another” behaviour. Recently, while rebuilding one of these workbooks in Excel 2024 LTSC, I discovered something very strange. The old checkboxes still work perfectly. But if I delete one and recreate it — even using the same VBA code that originally created the controls — Excel creates a different kind of placement behaviour. After a full day of controlled testing, XML inspection and A/B workbook comparison, the problem became clear: Excel can still read, display, save and execute legacy Form Control checkboxes using true “Move and size with cells” behaviour — but current Excel cannot recreate that same state for a newly created Form Control checkbox through the normal UI or VBA object model. That is not just inconvenient. For existing business workbooks, it is a serious backward-compatibility problem. The simple VBA code that used to work The original controls were created with ordinary Excel VBA: Set myCBX = wks.CheckBoxes.Add( _ Top:=cell.Top, _ Left:=cell.Left, _ Width:=cell.Width, _ Height:=cell.Height) Nothing exotic. No custom event engine. No ActiveX. No external add-in. Just a standard Excel Form Control checkbox positioned exactly over a cell. The workbook contains roughly 1,000 of these controls. The old ones still behave correctly today. The problem starts only after deleting them and creating new ones. What changes? In the Excel UI, the difference is immediately visible. For an original legacy checkbox: Format Control → Properties shows: Move and size with cells The option is selected, although it is greyed out. For a newly created checkbox in current Excel: Move but don’t size with cells is selected instead. That already suggests something changed internally. But the real evidence is inside the .xlsm package. The OOXML tells the story I created two controlled test workbooks: Workbook A Original legacy Form Control checkboxes that behave correctly. Workbook B The same workbook, but the checkboxes were deleted and recreated in current Excel using the original VBA logic. The internal OOXML differs. The working legacy controls contain placement information equivalent to: moveWithCells="1" sizeWithCells="1" and use genuine two-cell anchoring. The newly generated controls are instead stored using one-cell-style placement semantics, including: <xdr:twoCellAnchor editAs="oneCell"> The important part is not merely the XML syntax. The resulting behaviour is observably different. With the legacy control, both ends of the object are anchored to the worksheet grid. With the newly created control, Excel effectively preserves the control size while cells move underneath it. That distinction becomes disastrous when rows are resized, hidden or filtered. Why filtering exposes the problem Imagine a checkbox sitting on row 50. With the legacy behaviour: Checkbox ↔ Row 50 boundaries When row 50 changes size, the checkbox changes with it. If row 50 is filtered out, the control disappears with the row. When the row becomes visible again, the control is still exactly where it belongs. With the newly generated control, its dimensions are not tied to both cell boundaries in the same way. After repeated resizing and filtering, controls can begin to overlap. That leads to one of the worst possible spreadsheet UI failures: You click the checkbox you can see, but another checkbox receives the click. For a workbook containing hundreds or thousands of rows, this makes the controls unreliable. “Just use .Placement = xlMoveAndSize” That was the obvious first solution. Excel VBA defines: xlMoveAndSize as the placement mode where an object moves and resizes with cells. So I tested: myCBX.Placement = xlMoveAndSize and: myCBX.Placement = 1 I also tested placement through the corresponding Shape: ws.Shapes(myCBX.Name).Placement = xlMoveAndSize And through a ShapeRange. And through DrawingObjects. And even the commonly suggested workaround: Group controls → set Group.Placement = xlMoveAndSize → Ungroup None of these recreated the original internal state in Excel 2024 LTSC. The workbook continued to serialize the new controls differently. This matches long-standing Microsoft guidance that Form Control checkboxes do not normally support “Move and size with cells” as an editable option, while ActiveX checkboxes do. And yet — this is the important part — existing legacy Form Control checkboxes in real workbooks can still possess and use that state. The most revealing experiment I then modified the OOXML manually. I took the newly generated workbook and patched the checkbox placement metadata to match the working legacy controls: moveWithCells="1" sizeWithCells="1" with proper two-cell anchoring and without the one-cell override. Then I reopened the workbook in Excel 2024 LTSC. And it worked. Immediately. No custom VBA reposition engine. No ActiveX. No workaround running continuously. The same Excel installation that would not create this state through VBA had absolutely no problem: - reading it, - displaying it, - saving it, - resizing the controls with rows, - and filtering them correctly. That is the key finding. The Excel rendering and file engines still fully understand this checkbox state. The missing part is the supported creation path. So is this an unsupported feature or a compatibility regression? Microsoft has historically documented Form Control checkboxes as not supporting “Move and size with cells” in the normal UI. That makes the situation unusual. The issue is not simply: “Excel removed a documented checkbox feature.” The stronger and more accurate statement is: Excel supports a legacy Form Control state in existing workbooks, continues to execute it correctly, but no longer provides an ordinary supported mechanism to reproduce that same state for a replacement control. For users maintaining long-lived Excel systems, the difference is academic. If an old control is accidentally deleted, replacing it with an apparently identical Form Control changes the behaviour of the workbook. That is a backward-compatibility problem. Why not switch to ActiveX? ActiveX checkboxes support richer placement behaviour. But that creates another problem. Microsoft now disables ActiveX controls by default in Microsoft 365 and Office 2024 for security reasons. When ActiveX is disabled, users cannot create new ActiveX objects or interact with existing ones. So the official alternatives are hardly attractive: Legacy Form Controls Lightweight and reliable — but cannot reproduce this legacy placement state normally. ActiveX Supports more control behaviour — but is now a legacy security-sensitive technology disabled by default in current Office. New in-cell checkboxes Architecturally much better — because the checkbox is part of the cell and represents TRUE/FALSE. But Microsoft’s own documentation currently lists the feature for: - Excel for Microsoft 365 - Excel for Microsoft 365 for Mac not Excel 2024 LTSC. That leaves perpetual Office users in an uncomfortable middle ground. This is where the product story becomes difficult to defend I am not claiming that Microsoft intentionally removed this behaviour in order to sell subscriptions. There is no evidence for that claim. But the resulting user experience is still hard to justify: 1. Excel can execute the legacy checkbox behaviour. 2. Excel can preserve it. 3. Excel can save it. 4. Excel accepts a manually patched workbook containing it. 5. Excel’s current object model does not provide a reliable way to recreate it. 6. The modern replacement — native in-cell checkboxes — is documented for Microsoft 365 rather than Excel 2024 LTSC. 7. The other legacy alternative, ActiveX, is now disabled by default for security reasons. For users maintaining mature Excel applications, this is a poor migration path. Why this matters beyond checkboxes This is not really a story about one checkbox property. It is about the contract users expect from long-lived productivity software. Excel workbooks are often not disposable documents. They can be: - product-management systems, - pricing tools, - engineering calculators, - operational forms, - purchasing systems, - inventory tools, - reporting applications, - or business processes maintained for ten or twenty years. When Excel continues to support the execution of an old document feature but silently prevents users from recreating an equivalent object, maintaining those systems becomes unnecessarily difficult. Backward compatibility should mean more than: “The file still opens.” It should also mean: “A user can maintain the workbook without reverse-engineering its OOXML package.” What Microsoft could do There are several reasonable fixes. Option 1 — Restore proper placement support Allow: CheckBox.Placement = xlMoveAndSize to generate the same placement state that Excel already understands for legacy controls. Option 2 — Expose the existing capability If the engine already supports it, expose “Move and size with cells” again for Form Control checkboxes. Option 3 — Provide a migration path Make the new in-cell checkbox functionality available to perpetual Excel releases as well, or provide an official conversion tool from legacy Form Controls to cell checkboxes. Option 4 — At minimum, document the limitation If this legacy state is intentionally read-only for compatibility, document it clearly. Currently, a user can spend hours debugging VBA without realizing that two visually identical Form Control checkboxes can have fundamentally different internal placement semantics. A workaround exists — but users should not need it The workaround I eventually used was to modify the .xlsm OOXML package so that newly generated controls use the same anchor metadata as the working legacy controls. That solved the problem immediately. But manually patching Office XML should not be necessary to restore behaviour that Excel itself already supports. It is a useful proof of concept. It is not an acceptable product-level solution. The reproducible evidence I have retained minimal A/B test workbooks demonstrating the problem: OLD Original Form Control checkboxes with correct legacy placement. NEW The same workbook after deleting and recreating the controls. The differences can be reproduced and inspected directly in the workbook OOXML. I would be happy to provide the files to Microsoft Excel engineering. Final thought Excel’s reputation was built partly on extraordinary backward compatibility. That is why companies still trust .xls and .xlsx files created years — sometimes decades — ago. This case shows an uncomfortable edge of that compatibility: Excel remembers how to use an old feature, but appears to have forgotten how to create it. When the workaround is to unzip an .xlsm, manually alter OOXML placement records, rebuild the package and reopen it in Excel — and Excel then works perfectly — it is difficult to argue that the capability itself is gone. The engine still knows how. The user simply no longer has a supported button or VBA path to ask for it. Microsoft, please give that capability back — or provide a proper migration path. Sources Microsoft documentation for native cell-based checkboxes: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/using-check-boxes-in-excel Microsoft-hosted discussion on Form Control checkbox limitations: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/4813119/is-there-a-way-to-assign-a-checkbox-to-a-cell Microsoft documentation on ActiveX controls being disabled by default: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/vba/activex-controls-are-disabled-by-default-in-microsoft-365-and-office-2024How to Use Checkboxes and In-Cell Lists for Interactive Project Tracking in Excel (Microsoft 365)
If you are using Excel solely for basic data entry, you are missing out on modern interactive capabilities available in Microsoft 365. Two standout features—Checkboxes and In-Cell Lists—make it much simpler to build dynamic status dashboards, track completion rates, and manage categorical values directly within cells. Below is a breakdown of how to implement both features in real business scenarios. 1. Interactive Checkboxes & Task Trackers When managing a project template or task list, you can replace plain text inputs with functional checkboxes. - Inserting Checkboxes: Select the target range in your task table and insert a checkbox from the ribbon. - Creating a Dynamic Status Column: A checked box returns TRUE, while an unchecked box returns FALSE. You can leverage this directly using a standard IF statement (for example, in cell F3 referencing checkbox cell D3): =IF(D3, "Completed", "Pending") Copy this formula down using Ctrl + D. Toggling the checkbox will instantly flip the status between Completed and Pending. - Calculating Real-Time Completion Percentages: To display an overall completion rate across all tasks: 1. Add a summary cell at the top of your sheet. 2. Use COUNTIF alongside COUNTA: =COUNTIF(D3:D20, TRUE) / COUNTA(D3:D20) 3. Format the cell as Percentage (%). Whenever a task is checked off, your completion metric updates automatically, giving teams and stakeholders immediate visibility into project progress. 2. In-Cell Lists for Skill and Tag Management Instead of creating messy text strings or sprawling columns to capture multiple skills or tags per employee: - Select the relevant cell under your dataset. - Go to Insert > List. - Enter your values (such as Power BI, SQL, Python). - Hit Enter. Hovering over the cell reveals the clean, consolidated list directly in place, keeping your dataset structured and readable.
Excel selects wrong cell
Hello, I am here to report on what seems to be a common issue... After working for a few minutes in excel, when I go to click on a cell, the wrong cell actually gets selected, and it is usually several cells above or below the cell my mouse is hovering over. I sometimes have success in saving, closing and reopening the book, but not always. Excel Office 365 version, updated on schedule, as always.
