Unsung Heroes: Repeat in Excel 97

As a teenager I adored Norton Commander, learned some UI magic from early videogames, and dreamed of a Mac my family couldn’t afford. But I think the first product that taught me something truly memorable in terms of user experience was, of all things, Excel 97. Excel 97 cooked. It was rendered in brand-new, gorgeous Tahoma, had keyboard underlines everywhere, and felt complete in terms of features. Sure, you could maybe sense the beginning of the bloat with the reorderable menus and the bolted-on Clippy, but Excel 97 felt tight and zippy even on an abominable computer put together on a high-schooler budget from used hardware pieces that were never meant to meet. But what made me love Excel 97 was one specific thing: the Repeat command. You could invoke Repeat via Ctrl+Y, but my fingers learned to love its stranger alter ego, F4. This is what pressing F4 did: It was a bit more clever than just replaying the previous action. If you changed the font and its size, it would repeat both:…