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Comment by standardUser | Hacker News Reader

I have several extremely complex spreadsheets that have reached a breaking point because "the maximum number of fonts has been exceeded". There's like 8 fonts being used at most. The problem is, I don't have an alternative piece of software that can maintain the other very complicated formatting, let alone import it. And it now starts to revert formatting randomly throughout the spreadsheets. It's a widely known problem with no solution I can find to date.

Google Sheets is great, but I'm probably one of the very few people who thinks we need a more robust and feature rich spreadsheet software, if only to compel Microsoft to strengthen their own.

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I must admit, of all the stories I’ve heard about Excel spreadsheets being “this one goes up to eleven” in their complexity, “too many fonts” is a new one.

Perhaps you could use an alternative differentiator for your data presentation?

I’m morbidly curious to hear more about this scenario.

To add my own anecdote, I've needed to use a lot of spreadsheets the last couple weeks and quickly became annoyed that different cells could have different fonts (which would sometimes happen when I was pasting in data). Of course I quickly learned to just paste in everything unformatted, but I thought to myself "why would anyone want to set fonts per cell?" I guess I just don't get out enough.

The "paste with styles" default is one of the worst things ever IMO. It's almost never what I want.

I hate it so much... some programs are even worse, they don't take ctrl shift v to get rid of the garbage. I've made it a habit to first paste stuff in a text editor, copy it again, and then paste it into programs like outlook so the formatting won't be all messed up...

Still don't know of a single case where the "feature" was useful.

PowerPoint

Paste with source formatting or theme, I can't recall the exact name right now, rules. It means being able to mooch slides from any file and use them with no real fuss.

An alternative is to turn the slide into a bitmap.

I get that there are a few cases where it's useful. Make those require "ALT-SHIFT' or whatever. Make normal paste insert just the text.

Yep. I agree! Sorry, it just popped out.

Your primary point is solid. Seconded.

Fortunately Teams takes ctrl shift v, and it also leaves links untouched.

Unfortunately it's rather easy to mistype it as ctrl shift c, which --as you might have guessed-- is "call everyone".

Amazing.

Try the "Paste as plain text" tool in PowerToys - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/advanced....

I think you are in good company. I’ve used excel extensively, and I’ve never even conceived of that number of fonts specifically being needed. Let alone breaking excel on fonts.

I’ve wondered about it for years; why is the ‘paste’ command not ‘paste without style’ by default? A system level option to change this would be a vast improvement.

I’ve seen all sorts of gross workarounds. The URL bar is my go to these days, mainly because that works on mobile.

Not parent, but in my spreadsheets fonts map to certainty ranges.

Serifs in increasing somberness for the most concrete numbers, sans for everyday estimates, and papyrus whenever I just toss random numbers in.

Could a human - in your scenario - differentiate the meaning between more than 8 fonts though?

When you've slowly built up a UI for your own purposes— whether the accretions are font faces or keybindings or context menu items— definitely! Picture a spreadsheet/convention that has evolved over the course of 6 years, seeing continuous use throughout that time.

As someone with color discrimination problems and contrast difficulties, I would so much prefer font/style coding over color coding. Sounds great!

Now, this is extremely interesting!

I am not a fan of encoding information in the presentation layer and I would use an extra column to show the "certainty" explicitly, but using different fonts in addition is an excellent idea. Many thanks for this!

Even in this case, though, I doubt you would go over the threshold of 8 fonts that was mentioned.

> It's a widely known problem with no solution I can find to date.

I can think of a solution: don’t use 9 different fonts.

You have cell background and text foreground color, font size, bold, underline, italics, strike through, cell border styles, conditional formatting, etc. There are plenty of formatting tools in Excel.

What are you not able to accomplish with those that you can accomplish with 9 font faces?

>don’t use 9 different fonts. You have ... font size, bold, underline, italics

so, what you are calling "fonts" (Arial, Times) are actually called "typefaces"

every pointsize in a typeface is a new font, and bold and italics the same.

so, we don't know if Excel is making the same common/casual error you are, but if their error message is "technically correct (the best kind of correct)", then italics and bold in each pointsize are all separate fonts, and that's what he might have too many of.

you can be very pedantic about it, but Excel has no problem with 8+ variations of font size, color, and formatting, and everyone outside of typeface designers and newspaper men references typefaces as "the font".

Excel also has no problem with more than a dozen typefaces, with one size/style of each (I just tested it.)

The error message is probably using “fonts” in the technically correct sense for combinations of typeface, size, and style, while the user experiencing the error is probably confused and reporting that they are only using 8 “fonts” using the term to mean typefaces (which is how Excel itself uses the term in the UI, with the typeface selector using the label “Fonts”.) But if you are using 8 typefaces, using multiple sizes and styles of each, you can easily be using over 100 actual fonts.

you can't attempt to decipher the error message without knowing the distinctions, and listen to you getting all pedantic with the history of newspapermen etc. eyeroll.gif

> so, what you are calling “fonts” (Arial, Times) are actually called “typefaces”

Excel (and standard Windows and Office – the two are still slightly different, I think – selector controls call typefaces “Fonts” in the selector control. That doesn’t mean it is using “Fonts” the same way in the error message, but…)

the reason font menus are called font menus and not typeface menus dates back to when computers used raster fonts and had limited memory. You didn't load typefaces, you loaded the typeface/size/styles that you needed and had memory for, literally the fonts. Since that's the language people learned, that's what's in the UI

Try it with more memory and/or larger swapfile space on your drive.

It might be OK until 8 specialty fonts need to be reproduced beyond a certain number of cells. If more memory was all it takes to fix, that would be good to know.

And there I was getting bothered about the limits of the xlcall c api.

Running 32-bit Excel mitigates quite a few of the limits. Sadly, I haven't managed to get WoW64 DLLs to load in 64-bit Excel: that would eliminate the majority of the issues, but it's tricky to set that up in the first place without the ability to store 64-bit return values (e.g. handles).

I can't imagine the use case for having more than 1 font in a spreadsheet. Please elaborate. I'm pretty sure Excel is the wrong tool for whatever job you are throwing at it.

Maybe a title, and perhaps some callout cells? but more than 8? I'm stretching to find a use case requiring 3 or 4.

> I'm pretty sure Excel is the wrong tool for whatever job you are throwing at it.

Thanks, you completed my bingo card.

I feel like this is a pretty important thing for the technically minded to get their heads around.

Doesn't the fact that you can't imagine a single reason why youd want multiple fonts on a spreadsheet alarm you?

Excel is for spreadsheets, 9+ fonts is not really a common use case for a spreadsheet. It sounds like OP is trying to do graphic design in Excel, but we'll probably never find out.

You're pretty sure it's the wrong tool, but you can't imagine a use case for a fairly basic feature of said tool?

Why do I now doubt your assertion?

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Sure, nine is a lot, but your comment says "more than 1 font". Without arguing the semantics of what you meant by "font", hopefully using different font sizes and emphasis (bold/italics) do make sense to you. If those make sense, then using a different font entirely shouldn't be too complicated to see as a feature that an Excel user who's not using it for graphics design reasonably want.

Legibility is an important consideration, and with Excel, the size of sheets tend to grow until there are too many columns. So now you have the normal regular size font and you use a different font that's more legible at small sizes, especially when rotated 90.

There have been umpteen attempts to replace Excel. User interviews to understand how customers actually use the tool are important. Having the hubris to say customers are doing it wrong without even bothering to understand their use case is the first step to failing at replacing Excel.

Don't get me wrong, I cringe every time I fire up a spreadsheet and it grows past a reasonable size or length of use, or any number of shortcomings. Sometimes I even switch tools or write my own when that happens but lately I find Airtable's a pretty good replacement for most human (aka not finance) use of spreadsheets.

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I had a friend who used Excel to render blueprints for the dream house she was designing. As an architecture student, I was both impressed and horrified!

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