We have a name for what Finbar9800 is experiencing: spreadsheet entropy. It is the slow, maddening decay of a tool that was never designed for the weight it now carries. The text boxes that multiply when nudged, the right-click menu that offers no escape, the quiet horror of three objects mysteriously linked to cells you cannot find, this is not a user error. This is a system telling you it has reached its limit. And our opinion is plain: you should not have to fight a text box to delete it.
The problem here is not that Finbar9800 is doing something wrong. They tried Ctrl+click. They tried drag-select. They tried the Go To Special menu. They looked for unlinking options. The tool simply refused to cooperate. That is not a skill gap; it is a design failure. Traditional spreadsheets treat objects like text boxes as second-class citizens, visible on screen, invisible to logic. They exist in a layer of the document that the delete key cannot reach. When a user has to resort to forum posts and workaround threads just to remove a floating rectangle, the spreadsheet has stopped being a productivity tool and started being an obstacle.
What this means for you is practical. Every minute spent wrestling with rogue text boxes is a minute not spent analyzing data, building models, or making decisions. The frustration Finbar9800 describes is not unique; it is the shared experience of anyone who has pushed a legacy tool past its intended use. And the multiplication issue, text boxes spawning as they are moved, suggests a deeper instability. The spreadsheet is not just failing to delete; it is actively creating new problems. That is not a tool you can trust for critical work.
The solution is not a better workaround. It is a different philosophy. AI-native spreadsheets handle objects differently because they treat every element as addressable data, not as orphaned artifacts. A text box in a modern environment is not a stubborn ghost; it is an object with clear properties, including a delete function that actually works. If you are spending your afternoons hunting for invisible links and multiplying boxes, ask yourself whether the tool is serving you or you are serving the tool. The answer, in this case, is clear.