I often encounter things that reinforce my belief that Microsoft are unbelievably clueless when it comes to writing software.

My latest find: How to prevent the automatic creation of hyperlinks in Excel for Mac.

"Excel for Mac does not provide a built-in method to override this behavior. However, this article contains sample methods that you can use to prevent Excel for Mac from automatically creating hyperlinks."

"To prevent Excel for Mac from automatically creating a hyperlink, use any of the following methods."

1. "Type an apostrophe at the beginning of the cell entry"
2. "Use a program-level event handler to prevent hyperlinks" (11 steps: ~50 lines of code)
3. "Use a program-level event handler to remove existing hyperlinks and to prevent Excel for Mac from automatically creating hyperlinks" (11 steps: ~45 lines of code)

So my options to stop this 'feature' are: corrupt my data, or use 45-50 lines of code to fix the program's poor usability.

I mean, it was only the 2004 version...