I see your perspective. To me, it’s unnatural (and perhaps even more error-prone) to duplicate a filled-in line and then revert stuff I don’t want.
Here’s an example of the first request. Let’s say I am entering an invoice and I have this single row:
And now, I create a second line:
If I wanted, say, another line of Bank Charges, it would be great to be able to just press Ctrl+D or some shortcut to populate into the active cell the contents of the CELL directly above it. Not the whole line. I would just press Ctrl+D (or whatever) and move on to the next cell instead of searching for Bank Charges in the list. Yes, in this exact example I could have duplicated the row, and then deleted the stuff I don’t want. But why should I have to? The ability to just grab the number above (whether it’s a description, price, etc doesn’t matter, as long as it’s a typical data entry field) would be nice. You don’t use Ctrl+D in Excel?
In the second request, imagine I have this vendor invoice:
Say he sends me his invoices written in crayon so I can’t import it, and even AI can’t read his horrible scrawl. So I have no choice but to manually re-key this invoice. Fine, no problem. I go thru and key in all the line items. In reality, what I usually do is key in the descriptions and amounts, then go back and assign accounts, because it’s quicker than going through and thinking through the value of each cell line by line. In this contrived example, I would like to now assign all 18 lines to Project A and Division 1. I presently have to perform 144 mouse movements to get this done, whereas I could just fill in the project in the first row, and then – somehow, via keystroke, icon, right-click, etc – use a Fill Down command to auto-fill all the remaining blank cells underneath it to assign the same project, and then repeat for division. Way fewer clicks. In this example, lines 1-10 could be for project A, and 11-18 for Project B. That would be a total of 4 entries with Fill Downs to populate all that.
As for navigating, you can’t be seriously suggesting that pressing Tab and Shift Tab innumerable times is “as good as” just using directional arrows to navigate the grid, so we’ll just leave that alone.
These are just 3 examples of usability enhancements during data entry. Does the product work? Yes. Can I do my task? Of course. Could it be easier? Definitely. Would it save minutes per day? Yes. Hence the request. I’m old. Used spreadsheets before we had color screens and mice. And even 40+ years later, mousing around is still annoying. Not saying we should live in caves and avoid new things, but small usability tweaks can help make tasks more pleasant.
