Excel Help: Ultra Frustrating

Although I love Excel like the brother I never had, its help capabilities have been bothering me lately. And, obviously, you want to know why, right?? So, let's say that I want to get help on a function... and to use a real-life example I encountered, let's say it's the INDIRECT function.

First, I type the function. As I type, a pop-up tells me that INDIRECT "returns the reference specified by a text string." That's slightly helpful, but it doesn't really tell me how to use the function properly. So, I finish typing the word and look to see what its arguments are.


This doesn't help. So, having written code in a past life, my next action is to put my cursor inside the word "indirect" and press F1. Unfortunately for me, this doesn't do much, because the program just launches the default help screen.


So, I diligently type "INDIRECT."



Why doesn't it just show me help on INDIRECT, the function name which I obviously typed? When searching for help. Two seconds ago!

So now this workflow has gone from one-keystroke contextual help to search to browsing, which is definitely degrading my experience. However, I'm a pretty calm guy, so I click "Lookup and reference functions (Reference)." [Note: It's lucky for me that I at least have an idea of what INDIRECT does, or I might not even think this page had relevant search results. What if I searched for a function that was under stats, but I expected it to be under math (two seperate sections)?]

Anyway, I'm now brought to this page, where I can scroll down to INDIRECT and finally get some details.


If you've been keeping track, that's like four screens and a bunch of typing to get to information that should've just come up when I hit F1. Deep sigh, Excel!! But I'll still use you...