5 common Excel annoyances you can fix in 5 minutes this weekend (September 18-20)

Published Sep 18, 2026, 7:00 AM EDT Tony Phillips is an experienced Microsoft Office user with a dual-honors degree in Linguistics and Hispanic Studies. Prior to starting with How-to Geek in January 2024, he worked as a document producer, data manager, and content creator for over ten years, and loves making spreadsheets and documents in his spare time. Tony is also an academic proofreader, experienced in reading, editing, and formatting over 3 million words of personal statements, resumes, reference letters, research proposals, and dissertations. Before joining How-To Geek, Tony formatted and wrote documents for legal firms, including contracts, Wills, and Powers of Attorney. Tony is obsessed with Microsoft Office! He will find any reason to create a spreadsheet, exploring ways to add complex formulas and discover new ways to make data tick. He also takes pride in producing Word documents that look the part. He has worked as a data manager in a secondary school in the UK and has years of experience in the classroom with Microsoft PowerPoint. He loves to encounter problems in Microsoft Office and use his expertise and legal-level training to find solutions. Outside of the Microsoft world, Tony is a keen dog owner and lover, football fan, astrophotographer, gardener, and golfer. Excel, like many apps, is a program of habits. You find an annoying quirk, come up with a way to work around it, and it becomes etched into your muscle memory. Over the years, I've learned that some of these quirks have surprisingly simple solutions: tweak the way you work, press a different key, or change a setting and leave it alone. If any of these five Excel annoyances sound familiar, you can learn the fixes in a few minutes this weekend. Ctrl+Z undoes something in another workbook Give each file some breathing room Ctrl+Z usually does exactly what you expect: it undoes the last thing you did. That is, until you're working in two Excel workbooks at once and it suddenly undoes something in the other file. Excel keeps its undo history within each instance of the program. Think of an instance as a separate Excel process: several workbooks can share one instance, meaning they share the same undo history. To give a workbook its own undo history, open it in a second instance. This sounds complicated, but it's actually not. Hold Alt, right-click the Excel icon (whether that's on your taskbar or a desktop shortcut), then click Open or Excel. You'll then be asked if you want to start a new instance of Excel, so click Yes. If you use a PERSONAL.XLSB file for your macros, you may see a File in Use message when you open the second Excel instance. This is because PERSONAL.XLSB is already open in your first instance. Click Read Only, and your workbook will still be fully editable and savable. The restriction applies to PERSONAL.XLSB, not the workbook you're working on. With the workbooks now in separate instances, each has its own undo history. So Ctrl+Z in workbook A only undoes changes made in workbook A, regardless of what you've done in workbook B. There are some minor trade-offs to be aware of: separate instances use more memory, and working with links, macros, or other connections between workbooks can be less convenient. For unrelated workbooks, though, separate instances can save you from an unpleasant Ctrl+Z surprise. Excel doesn't autofill the alphabet Teach it a new sequence Excel is great at continuing sequences of numbers and dates, but if you've ever tried to get it to continue A, B, C, D..., it doesn't automatically treat the alphabet as a sequence. You can fix that by adding the alphabet to Excel's Custom Lists. Go to File > Options > Advanced, scroll down to the General section, and click Edit Custom Lists. Select NEW LIST, type A through Z with each letter on a separate line, and click Add. Now enter A in a cell and drag the fill handle. Excel will continue through the alphabet all the way to Z. Better still, it remembers the list, so you only have to set it up once. Your formula is covering the cell you need Move the typing elsewhere In some scenarios, such as when you're editing a hard-coded value to turn it into a formula, the formula text can quickly extend beyond the cell you're editing and cover the cells you need to click. Until recently, I'd usually work around this by clicking a nearby cell and using the Arrow keys to move to the one I needed. That works, but it's irritating when you find yourself doing it repeatedly. You can avoid this by telling Excel to edit cell contents in the Formula Bar instead. Go to File > Options > Advanced, and uncheck Allow editing directly in cells. You can still double-click a cell or press F2 to start editing as before; the difference is that Excel puts the formula in the Formula Bar rather than over the worksheet. If you've used Excel for years, this is quite a big change to how you work, so you might ultimately prefer direct cell editing. But if you regularly have to work around long formulas covering nearby cells, moving formula editing to the Formula Bar can remove that annoyance. Alt+Tab doesn't jump between worksheets Give each tab its own window Alt+Tab is probably one of the most-pressed shortcuts for anyone who works in several apps every day. But if you go to use it to switch between worksheets in the same Excel workbook, it won't take you where you expect. That's because Windows treats those worksheets as part of the same app. For worksheets next to each other, Ctrl+Page Up and Ctrl+Page Down are usually the quickest way to move between them. But when you're constantly switching between two particular worksheets, there's a better option. Go to View > New Window. Excel opens another window showing the same workbook, so you can have a different worksheet visible in each window. You can then use Alt+Tab to switch between them. Any changes you make are still saved to the same workbook. This is particularly handy when the worksheets are far apart, because you don't have to cycle through all the intervening tabs just to get back to the one you need. Arrow keys insert cell references Put Excel into the right mode This Excel behavior can leave you scratching your head if you don't know why it happens. You're editing a formula in a dialog box, press an Arrow key to move the cursor, and Excel suddenly inserts a cell reference instead. This happens because these formula fields open in Enter mode by default. In Enter mode, pressing an Arrow key switches Excel into Point mode, meaning the keystroke selects a cell to add to the formula instead of moving the cursor. The fix is to press F2. This switches Excel to Edit mode, where the Arrow keys move the cursor through the formula text instead. Press F2 again to switch back to Enter mode. You can see which mode Excel is using on the status bar at the bottom of the window. Look for Enter or Edit while you're working in a formula field. This is one of those Excel behaviors that makes much more sense once you know what's happening. There's nothing wrong with the Arrow key or the formula; Excel is simply in a different mode than you expected. Make Excel work your way Once you know where to look, many of Excel's little annoyances have simple fixes. And there are plenty of other small changes you can implement this weekend to make Excel feel more like your own, from customizing the ribbon to uncovering some useful hidden status bar options. Spending a few minutes making those changes today can save you a lot of hassle next week.