Case Study 9 - Microsoft Excel

The characters “[” and “]” are perfectly valid in Windows, but Excel tries to steer you away from using them:

Excel also has a very wrong way of drawing cell comments. Sometimes, cell comments don’t appear at all:

Then you only see part of the comment:

For some reason, Excel draws comments onto the spreadsheet grid itself, which is incompatible with the use of Freeze Panes. The comment will always appear with a constant offset from the parent cell (no matter where you drag it), which exacerbates the problem. More curiously, different parts of the same comment can appear at once, when the different panes each cover a part of the area used by the comment:

Even when editing a comment, Excel will still refuse to push it up above the pane divisions: