[grishka]

This all can be worked around given enough will. Excel files do have a format version number in them somewhere, right? I'm sure they do. So support the old behavior for older files, and the new one for the newer ones. All files created with the new version of Excel won't be affected by that bug, but the older ones, that might rely on it, won't break either.

[wiseleo]

It gets worse. This workaround is also in VBA, which has an enormous install base.

Books on Excel programming explicitly call out this issue. This is one thing I definitely would not want fixed.

You will break countless workflows that have operated for decades.

[bombcar]

And even better non-excel spreadsheets have to know the bug and imitate it when opening excel docs.