I once had a coworker who was definitely paid more than me manage to accidentally turn every cell in the worksheet he was editing into a hyperlink. All the same hyperlink, to one of our internal operations sites. He absolutely panicked and couldn't tell me what he'd done, just that he needed me to undo it. He'd only been working on the file for about five minutes before this happened, so I had him close it without saving and start over. This is tied for first with another coworker as instances of men roughly my age at work being absolutely floored by me providing a very obvious "technical" solution.
We started there. In trying to fix it, he had done a bunch of other stuff before calling me over, and I didnt want to stand there for ten minutes watching him hit ctrl+z over and over again.
The neat bit is that, in excel, it’s a global function. So short of using console magic to force multiple instances of excel, it will undo everything you did in order across multiple different workbooks.
So delete a column in book 1, clear a cell in book 2, overwrite a cell in book 1, format a url as a hyperlink in book 2. Hitting ctrl + z twice in book 2 won’t undo hyperlink, undo clear. It will undo hyperlink, undo overwrite. Because it’s awful.
There are also some changes that undo will simply not find. Forgot what exactly, it's not particularly common, but it can happen. And of course macros are beyond the capabilities of the undo function.
I did that and hit undo. I’m not stupid. Whatever icon I accidentally selected literally changed all the document settings including new ones I created.
It did not work lol whatever I did changed the document entirely. I even started a new document and it was apparently something I selected that changed all the documents primary settings.
You're getting downvoted but I can confirm that there's a lot of things you can do in word that undo does not fix. That function can save a lot of ass, but not all the ass. And it's usually the global setting like styles that are resistant to being reverted, and will haunt you until you manage to figure out what arcane key combination you accidentally hit to cause the trouble.
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u/theladythunderfunk 23h ago
I once had a coworker who was definitely paid more than me manage to accidentally turn every cell in the worksheet he was editing into a hyperlink. All the same hyperlink, to one of our internal operations sites. He absolutely panicked and couldn't tell me what he'd done, just that he needed me to undo it. He'd only been working on the file for about five minutes before this happened, so I had him close it without saving and start over. This is tied for first with another coworker as instances of men roughly my age at work being absolutely floored by me providing a very obvious "technical" solution.