We'll say it plainly: Excel's behavior here isn't a bug you need to fix, it's a design limitation you're meant to work around, and that distinction matters. The user who posted this question is doing something perfectly logical. They have accounting schedules with numbers and descriptions. They want the resulting sheet to carry the meaningful name, not a generic placeholder like Sheet93. When the number works but the description doesn't, the frustration is justified. Yet the real issue isn't a setting they missed. It's that Excel's Report Filter Pages feature was built for a world where data is flat and naming is incidental, not intentional.
What this means in practice is that you're stuck choosing between two imperfect outcomes. Use the number, and your sheets are named correctly but lose the context that makes them useful to anyone who doesn't have the key memorized. Use the description, and you get a pile of Sheet93, Sheet94, names that tell you nothing and force you to rename each one manually. Neither option serves the person who needs to hand these schedules to a colleague or a client. The tool forces you to accept a trade-off that shouldn't exist. You shouldn't have to sacrifice clarity for accuracy, or vice versa.
This is where modern spreadsheet tools can step in and do better. An AI-native approach would treat your descriptions as the primary label, not as a secondary field that Excel arbitrarily demotes when generating new sheets. The underlying logic should be simple: if a field contains human-readable text that uniquely identifies a record, use it. Don't fall back to a generic counter just because the field isn't numeric. That kind of decision-making is not a technical challenge; it's a design philosophy. And the philosophy behind legacy tools is that you, the user, will clean up the mess afterward. That's not good enough.
So here is our concrete take: stop treating this as a setting you need to find. Instead, recognize it for what it is, a signal that the tool you're using was built for a different era. The question isn't how to make Excel name your sheets correctly. The question is why you should accept a tool that makes you ask in the first place. Explore a solution that treats your descriptions as the source of truth from the start. Your schedules deserve names that mean something.