There is no reason a user should have to hunt through six separate tabs just to see how a cell is formatted. The Reddit user who posed this question, wondering if they were "thinking too much", is actually thinking exactly the right amount. The Format Cells dialog box, with its tabs for Number, Alignment, Font, Border, Patterns, and Protection, is a relic of an era when software designers assumed users wanted complexity hidden behind clicks. That assumption is outdated.
What this user is really asking for is a unified view of formatting settings. In practical terms, that means seeing font size, number type, border style, and fill color all on one screen, without flipping back and forth. For anyone who has ever tried to troubleshoot why a cell looks one way but behaves another, this single change would save real time. It removes the friction of memory, "Was the alignment on the second tab or the third?", and replaces it with clarity. You see the full picture at a glance. That is not a luxury; it is a baseline expectation for modern tools.
The deeper point is about how software should serve the user, not the other way around. Legacy spreadsheet applications were built when processing power and screen real estate were scarce, so they hid settings behind tabs to keep dialogs small. That constraint no longer exists. Today, an AI-native spreadsheet can render every formatting option simultaneously, dynamically adjusting the layout based on the user's screen. It can even surface the most relevant settings first, based on the data in the cell. The question from this Reddit user is not a complaint, it is a signal that people are ready for tools that match how they actually work.
So no, you are not thinking too much. You are thinking forward. The next generation of spreadsheet tools should treat formatting not as a hidden configuration, but as a visible, manipulable layer of the data itself. A unified view is the first step. The second step is making that view intelligent enough to anticipate what you need before you start clicking. That is the future of data management, and it starts with listening to the people who use these tools every day.