Tracing Precedents and Dependents Clears Undo Stack

Martyn was recently auditing a worksheet and found that clicking Trace Precedents or Trace Dependents results in the Undo stack being cleared. He wonders if there is a way to use these auditing tools and not have the Undo stack cleared.

When talking about the Undo stack, it has long been known that running a macro will clear it. Most add-ins will clear the Undo stack as well, but this is related to macros doing the clearing because add-ins most often rely on macros to do their work.

It seems that macros aren't the only triggers for clearing, however, as Martyn has found out. The auditing tools do, indeed, clear the Undo stack. There is no way to turn this off, and the only workaround is to save your workbook often, and if you must use a stack-cleaning command, you may want to save different "development versions" of your workbook, under different names so that you can, if necessary, go back to an earlier version.

This is not much of a workaround in some scenarios, I know, but it is the best that one can offer when it comes to the Undo stack being cleared. You might also consider when you are using the auditing tools—if you can put off their use until a point in workbook development where you are sure you will not need to utilize the Undo stack, that may be the way to go.

You might also consider putting in an "idea" at Microsoft's UserVoice site. This is the site where Microsoft supposedly gets ideas from users about how to improve Excel. You can find the site here:

https://excel.uservoice.com/

In doing a search at the site for "undo stack" I located this previous user suggestion which is directly related to the problem Martyn brings up:

https://excel.uservoice.com/forums/304921-excel-for-windows-desktop-application/suggestions/16149373

The suggestion was created back in September 2016, and since then has garnered 3 votes. This low vote count means that it will probably not make it high on Microsoft's radar for things to change. So, the idea would be for Martyn to not create a new suggestion, but to up-vote the existing suggestion and get like-minded people to do the same.

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