26 June 2022
Summary: Accelerator Keys now works when Excel is in full screen mode, and when there is an active Zoom or MS Teams call ongoing.
Hi everyone,
I wrote previously about hiring a developer to work on longstanding usability issues in Accelerator Keys. These weren’t severe, but they weren’t great for user experience.
I’m glad to announce that these efforts are bearing fruit. Accelerator Keys now works when Excel is in full screen mode, and when there is an active Zoom or MS Teams call ongoing.
These two issues shared a common root cause, which is that Accelerator Keys relies on placing an overlay on top of the active Excel window. There were implementation complexities to work through when Excel is in full screen mode, because that means Excel is the topmost window already, and when a Zoom call is ongoing, because Zoom becomes the topmost window to facilitate its screen sharing and active call floating toolbars and windows that you’ll all be familiar with.
We’ve also put in place additional crash logging to track down the sporadic crashes of the app. I emphasise again that these have only affected 1% of sessions so far, and hopefully the fixes above also cleared up some edge cases in the app, but we’ll keep on working to make sure Accelerator Keys becomes a seamless and invisible part of your daily work.
Next on my list is catching up on the long list of requested shortcuts that has built up while we’ve been working on the issues above. In particular, the next release will have significantly expanded coverage in PowerPoint.
Thank you all, as always, for the support.
