"Bernard Liengme" wrote...
Microsoft knew from the day after the release of whatever version
it was (2000 or 2002, I think) . . .

It was in Excel 97, and I think it was in Excel 5, but I threw out my
Excel 5 disks long ago, so no way to check.

. . . that allowing labels to be used in formulas was a
big mistake. . . .

Since when does Microsoft acknowledge mistakes much less fix them? If
they ever fix mistakes, why won't they fix the MOD function, which
can't handle the full range of double precision floating point
operands that the hardware's FPREM1 (Wintel-centric) can handle? If
Microsoft could claim that fixing this bug would break backwards
compatibility, the same applies to labels in formulas.

. . . The writing was on the wall by XL2003 which had this
feature turned off by default. Many Excel writer have preached
about the evils of labels but some did not listen. There is no
"fix" other than removing the feature. . . .

Other than providing a conversion tool that would create defined names
from labels. If Excel 2007 is smart enough to be able to replace
labels in formulas with range references, it should also be smart
enough to have created defined names using the original labels
possibly with identifying text added to the name referring to those
ranges. That would still have removed the feature, but in a much more
intelligent, user-friendly way.

Why not spend some time creating/defining Names?

An excellent question to pose to the Excel developer team.

In my own cynical mind, I think Microsoft was too lazy to design the
Excel 2007 equivalent of the Excel 2003 & prior Label Ranges dialog,
and they couldn't come up with a clean way to stuff a command for it
into the ribbon. It's likely labels were stored in formulas in XLS
files in such a way that it was just easier to convert them to range
addresses than to rewrite the UI for labels. That, and there were
probably some name space collisions with tables and structured
referencing.