Excel really woke up and chose violence today. You're sitting there, innocently trying to do something completely reasonable with your spreadsheet, and Excel just hits you with the "We can't do that to a merged cell" error like it's personally offended by your audacity. No explanation, no helpful suggestions, just pure rejection wrapped in a passive-aggressive dialog box. The merged cell feature is basically Excel's way of saying "I'll let you make your spreadsheet look pretty, but the moment you try to actually USE it for anything, I'm shutting this whole operation down." It's the ultimate betrayal—Excel gives you the tools to create the problem, then acts shocked when you need to work with what you've created. Truly the most toxic relationship in software.