As most of you know my work is IT related and as such you sometimes get into or see funny situations.

My colleague got a call where there was a complaint that within Excel (spreadsheet application) the left mouse button behaved like a the right mouse button and the user had no idea how to get rid of this issue. Well as such he went over to the user thinking it was a mouse driver issue.

After arriving he went over the configuration finding nothing. He called me (as such I’m aware of this happening) to see if I had a solution. Going over the office help system, options in Excel and finally some abuse in Google also I came up empty handed. Already busy for more then 15 minutes we gave up on finding any clues and he went on.

I heard later he first repaired office, then reinstalled the Excel application and finally asked the user if he could take the system (laptop) with him. He setup a nearby system so the user could continue working. The user in question asked him what could have caused this kind of behaviour and my colleague responded with some options and one of the things he  mentioned was a wrong keyboard combination, to which the user replied : Yes, my husband was busy with my system last evening and he pressed this button which is now stuck…….

The mentioned button was the Menu key which is used by windows to do what normally was done by the secondary mouse button. This only had an effect in Excel as all other application responded normally. But in excel suddenly both mouse buttons appeared to do the same thing. After the button was released Excel worked normally again and the call was resolved after one hour……… Gee, I miss the days I was working on a helpdesk………

Not!