MsoTriState Has Too Many States

sometimes when i feel my code has too many confusing states, i like to stop, take a deep breath, and open the MSDN page for the MsoTri0State enum. MsoTri0State is "a tri-state Boolean value". it has five possible values. only two of them are supported. the only supported values are true and false. Fields Name Value Description msoTriStateToggle -3 Not supported. msoTriStateMixed -2 Not supported. msoTrue -1 True. msoFalse 0 False. msoCTrue 1 Not supported. Microsoft Learn MsoTriState Enum (Microsoft.Office.Core) Specifies a tri-state Boolean value.

A screenshot of a social media post jokes about programmers overwhelmed by confusing code states. The author recommends reading the Microsoft MsoTriState documentation, which technically lists five possible values even though only true and false are supported. The punchline is the absurd mismatch between a supposedly tri-state Boolean and its unnecessarily complicated enum.

• @profunctor_io / 11372 2026-03-20