Not even the simplest things work with computers these days.

I have an Excel sheet and I want to copy a value into an MSN conversation. On Windows. Notice the vendor of all these products.

1. I copy the cell and in the middle of the sentence I’m tying into MSN I press Ctrl-V. MSN hangs for about 5 seconds. Then a notification is sent to the other party that I want to transfer a file, something .tmp.gif, i.e. an bitmap image of the value I’m trying to my sentence. Of course the other party hasn’t seen the first part of my sentence yet, as it’s still in the message composer and I haven’t pressed Return yet, so this file transfer request would come as a bit of a surprise to the other party.
2. No problem - I can double-click the cell in Excel to edit it, and copy the characters from the cell, as opposed to copying the cell itself. However, the cell is a formula. That means that when I edit the cell I get text such as =D1+E9 as opposed to the numeric result value which I wanted to paste into the MSN conversation.

So what is the solution? As far as I can see I have to have both windows open side-by-side on the screen, and type in the value into the MSN window that Excel is displaying….

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 30th, 2008 at 4:08 pm and is filed under Broken. You can subscribe to Adrian's blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.