Environment Variables and Path in Windows 10

Re:Environment Variables and Path in Windows 10 by cm2187 on Monday October 26, 2015 @04:21AM (#10450084)

Talking about a massively used piece of UI that Microsoft never updated in 20 years: the FX button near the formula bar in Excel. This is the only way to find a function with a description of what it does or to find what are the arguments of a function. It still shows a tiny non resizable window, with a list of thousands native functions and udf crammed in a tiny listbox, a search box that doesn't search anything, etc...

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Re:Environment Variables and Path in Windows 10 by Someone1234 on Monday October 26, 2015 @10:23AM (#10451613)

Excel is full of these...

Press CTRL-F (find/replace), and you'll note that even in Excel 2013 CTRL-A (select all) doesn't work in either the find or replace boxes.

It has been this way since at least Office 95.

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Re:Environment Variables and Path in Windows 10 by ZenoArrow on Monday October 26, 2015 @04:36AM (#10450117)

F1 is your friend.

Imagine you'll be able access this through the online help:

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Excel-functions-by-...

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Re:Environment Variables and Path in Windows 10 by cm2187 on Monday October 26, 2015 @04:53AM (#10450163)

F1 is actually my worse enemy, too close to F2 for my fat fingers.

The offline help is fine for Excel functions. But where I work, 90% of the functions used are coming from addins, and even though they also have a documentation somewhere, it can't be reached with F1.

Documentation is necessary but hints should be inline/contextual, like intellisense in visual studio. I don't want to have to leave what I am doing just to figure out which is the next argument in a function.

Excel could use a powerful autocomplete like intellisense that gives you basic documentation inside the auto-complete.

But Office is the "sleeping beauty" of Microsoft. A bit of an old and hairy beauty though.

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Re:Environment Variables and Path in Windows 10 by mistermann on Monday October 26, 2015 @09:42AM (#10451310)

Rarely does F1 work (like it used to) in most any MS app I've used in the last 5 years. I think they decided to just say fuck it and outsource that functionality to Google.

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Re:Environment Variables and Path in Windows 10 by ZenoArrow on Monday October 26, 2015 @12:01PM (#10452259)

F1 works incredibly well in Visual Studio, especially if you're working with one of the flagship .NET languages. For example, highlight a core language element in your code, press F1 and you'll get specific help on it.

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