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Avoid a text selection bug in Excel

I like Excel. I cover it often here, and I use it in projects where it probably would make more sense not do to so. Like my current task, which is developing a stats tracking package for a billiards training game (yea, obscure, I know).

While working on this workbook, I ran into a problem where I couldn't effectively select text in the formula bar: Whenever I tried, the selection would continually grow back to the left, regardless of what I did with the mouse. I also couldn't click on a location in the formula to place the cursor there; it would instantly start selecting text. It looks like this:

But this didn't always happen—in fact, it didn't happen very often at all. And I didn't seem to see the problem in new workbooks, only this one, and then sometimes seemingly randomly, in others. After way too much troubleshooting, I figured out the cause and the solution:

If you resize the pop-up menu at the left of the screen, that triggers the selection bug. Resizing after that, even back to where it was, won't help. You can either close and reopen the workbook, or drag the slider to remove the box. This video shows the entire process, from working to broken and back again:

I don't know how old this glitch is—it exists at least as far back as Excel 16.33 (16.46 is current). I'm trying to get someone at Microsoft's attention, but if you can help, please do—it's a very annoying bug.



Be aware of this Applescript-with-droplet bug

Another post thanks to Many Tricks' Peter Maurer; this particular bug bit me last night—I spent 30 minutes trying to figure out why a compiled AppleScript with a droplet wasn't working. I never did get it, so I emailed Peter, and he pointed me to these tweets from a while back…

And yea, that was the problem: As soon as I added the +x to the compiled script, everything worked as expected. The exact syntax is:

chmod +x /path/to/compiled.app/Contents/MacOs/droplet

I'm documenting this here so that I can find it more easily the next time I save a compiled droplet AppleScript and forget about this not-so-little bug.



My iMac’s literal bug

Another lost-to-Google-policies Tweet movie; this time, about a bug in my iMac that was lingering after 24 full hours.

The bug, of course, was a real one; here's the video that's vanished from the above tweet:

Thankfully, the little buggy vanished not soon thereafter, thankfully not remaining onscreen for eternity.