Thank you @Thomas Richard for your answer. So I guess there's no solution except updating?

@acer Wow thank you so much!

This is exactly what I thought "collect" or "factor" would do, initially. Why is it a conversion procedure and why was it so hard to find it? x)

I cannot talk too much about my work but I can say this: my program create computation files written in C++, which I want to be as efficient as possible. Therefore, factorizing decreases the number of operations (while guiding the "optimize" procedure) and being able to not call the "pow" function in those files helps reducing the computation time as multiplications are done quicker (I only have integer exponents, 2 and 3 mostly).

@tomleslie Thank you for taking some of your time to answer me.

Without entering to much in the details, I want to get rid of exponentiation (and therefore having no call to the "pow" function).

Your proposal, similar to @nm, will certainly help me, so thanks for that too.

@nm Thank you for this reply.

Definitely keeping it. It also works when factorizing several variables simultaneously.

Unfortunately, it does not work with derivatives as the "has" function detect it, but locally changing their names should solve this problem.

@acer @rlopez
Thank you for your replies. Control+Alt+Shift+S is an interesting shortcut but it only works when the cursor is at the lowest level of (sub)sections. Indeed, it does nothing when the cursor is in an execution group of the main section, containing all the subsections. I think it could be a very useful feature in a lot of different cases, like presentations for instance as @Scot Gould said.

Alternatively, is there a way to skip a section when using the "Execute the entire worksheet" command? Or maybe a way to stop this command at some point in code?

@vv I'm new to Maple so I don't feel confident enough to change the code of the function haha
I'll keep your suggestion of using sparse=err(), if my lab decide one day to upgrade our Maple license.

Thank you for your detailed answer!