Excel 365 Formula Bar font is different BUT only when displaying a formula

Anonymous
2024-03-18T02:31:32+00:00

Dear Excel MVP,

Some months ago something changed in my Excel 365 Formula Bar display. The default font for new workbooks has always been Arial 8...no change there. The formula bar for text values displays correctly Arial 8 and if I click on the formula bar I can change the font as required. However, for any cell containing a formula the font displayed in the formular bar is not Arial 8, but appears to be Consolas 8. See the screen clip below. In addition if I click on the formula bar the font and size are greyed out and can't be changed.

This bug appeared following an Office 365 update. I am a Microsoft 365 Insider and all my software is 100% up-to-date.

Can you please advise what the problem is and how to resolve it?

Cheers,
Geoff Frost

Microsoft 365 and Office | Excel | For home | Windows

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Anonymous
2024-06-23T14:53:55+00:00

Hi David,

First of all, many of the participants of this thread think that this is a bug. Unfortunately, it isn't. As it was announced in this Microsoft Excel Blog las year:

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/excel-blog/excel-s-formula-bar-gets-a-new-look/ba-p/3902462

There are only two problems with monospaced Consolas in the formula bar: that it is monospaced, and that it is Consolas.

I found the example in the linked article really biased, hence frustrating: what percentage of Excel users write formulas like that as the dominant part of their work crying out for monospaced character? Formulas without numbers and cell references? They are arguing with programming ****, but Excel formula bar is in most of the cases not a programming interface.

I use Excel, Excel VBA, Power Pivot on a regular basis, I write short and long formulas, and I never missed this trash. On the contrary, I really hate it!

The formulas became longer and this new spacing breaks words into letters. Consolas is a disaster, its accentuated slashed zero attracts the look, but that only distracts attention from grasping the formula's meaning. The 3 and 5 are ugly, the latter is harder to distinguish from B or E than by using any other character. Functions with . separation will be spaced before and after the . , so instead of keeping together the function name as an undivided expression, it splits it up into 3 parts.

I discovered recently that Google Sheets use monospaced font in the formula bar, but it is not Consolas: the zero is almost the same, but the other numbers are more readable.

Was Microsoft afraid that users would switch to Google Sheets because of this feature?

Dénes

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Anonymous
2024-09-30T02:20:32+00:00

This has been fixed!!!!

You can disable it under Options > Formulas > Use monospace font for all formulas. 

Excel’s Formula Bar Gets a New Look (microsoft.com)

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Anonymous
2024-06-23T19:33:28+00:00

Thanks for this Dénes! So they have simply dropped this **** on us and don't even make it optional.

Also good to know for the future that this forum is only for venting, as nobody from Microsoft has said a word.

Thanks again!

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  2. Anonymous
    2024-06-22T14:41:54+00:00

    I just started to notice this myself.

    Microsoft recently decided that the default font of Calibri was no longer "hip" or "current" and changed everything to the Aptos font, which is hidious by design. I had changed all of my Office applications back to Calibri, however; today I just noticed for the first time that equations in the formula bar up top in Excel is the exact same font as you are describing, yet cells that don't have any equations at all are showing the proper font in the formula bar.

    For someone with OCD, this is highly annoying and irritating.

    David

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