Why "Apply to all documents" option is not shown in Excel?

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i noticed a strange difference between Excel and Word (tested on Office 2010 and 2013): in Word, i can disable, for example, the picture compression for all documents: Word screenshot

But in Excel, the same drop-down list doesn't contains "All new documents". And this is true for all Excel options: Excel screenshot

This doesn't make any sense to me. Can someone explains me why?

PS: I found a workaround in registry to disable picture compression, but i guess it is not the normal way.

plunkets

Posted 2017-02-16T08:52:43.500

Reputation: 103

"Why ... option is not shown in Excel?" - I think this was a business decision of Microsoft, don't think anybody here could give you the real answer. – Máté Juhász – 2017-02-16T09:35:01.060

Maybe you're right, i only have the Small Business edition. – plunkets – 2017-02-16T10:39:54.970

Answers

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It's related to how new documents are created in the different applications.

Word is designed to format text ready for printing or presentation, so it has a lot of formatting customisation options available. To simplify storing all these options and using them over and over, every new Word document is based on a template file, normal.dot. When you store a setting for "All new documents", it's making that change in normal.dot so that new documents based on that template will pick it up.

The advantage of this method is that you can come up with a highly customised default template for all new documents that will store every option imaginable. The disadvantage is that normal.dot is prone to corruption, and that can cause corruption in all documents based on it.

Excel is designed to store and analyse large or complex data sets. It's not a design-oriented application, so its formatting options are much more limited. This means that it does not, by default, use a template for new workbooks. There is the capability to create such a template file, but it has to be manually created. This means that a lot of options related to formatting are only stored in individual files, and this option is one of them.

Yes, it would have been possible to use a normal.xlt template for new workbooks, but it was considered unnecessary. The relatively few options that can be set for new workbooks can be stored easily enough in a few registry keys. It's much more corruption-resistant, but harder to predict everything that someone might want to set as a default.

Werrf

Posted 2017-02-16T08:52:43.500

Reputation: 769