Update to answer my question: my work PC had 'turn off all unnecessary animations (when possible)' ticked in the ease of access centre under the 'make your computer easie to use'. I don't know if this is by default. Unticking it made these animations occur but wow it creates a bit of lag in excel even on my workstation. This is probably some configuration thing on my work's SOE and why they have it disabled in the first place.

By default this animation is on, yes. It's one of those (many) subtle things that makes Excel so awesome for non-trivial spreadsheet use, despite it being derided in certain circles.

IIRC those animations have been introduced with the current version, Office 2016.

I think they make it really easy to follow, especially when someone else is editing and sharing their screen.

Office 2013 introduced these animations. Sadly, it also ditched ClearType in most of the UI.

Which is why I'm sticking with Office 2010.

Microsoft totally wrecked font rendering in Windows 10 (W8 too?). Edge browser doesn't have ClearType either, which is braindead for a program you spend so much time reading in.

Edge 14 in the Anniversary Update actually brings back ClearType support for at least some text, so there's still a glimmer of hope that Microsoft will work to improve text rendering in Windows. Raymond Chen had an interesting post on how subpixel scrolling makes ClearType smoothing impossible: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20150129-00/?p=...

Exactly, office 2016 is office 2010 with another color scheme and "new features" like this...