Dear James,
Thank you for your original reply, I don't know if you still work there or if someone else has taken your place....so, whomever is responsible for these things:
According to this thread, this was brought to your attention in July 2015. It is now May 2016. To date, it has been 10 MONTHS and several updates later, and you haven't yet been able to reinstate a useful, indeed essential feature for so many of your clients,
which you should never have removed in the first place.
Did your header/footer guy retire and take the secrets of the last 25 years with him?
How many 'votes' do you need before someone in the vacuum of wisdom decides to just put back what you took out. Telling people to "vote it to importance" is meaningless without some kind of target.
Surely, it can't be that hard to reinstate, nor to avoid problems like this in future. When you do your 'upgrades', surely you can just be content with leaving standard features alone, and fix actual problems.
When you release your product to the market, purchasers are free to make of it what they will. You have no right to second guess the market and determine what other people need from your programs, or how they will present their work.
People buy "Office" because it is supposed to offer a suite of complementary programs. That is, there is a framework of standard inclusions so you can join up all your spreadsheets, documents and presentations and make them relatively cohesive. Why would
you remove functions from one program that are considered bog standard to the successful cohesion of the parts? It puts this cohesion in the rubbish!
IT DEFEATS THE WHOLE PREMISE OF YOUR PRODUCT.
In the meantime, why are we being charged full price for a subscription to a product that no longer provides the features we require for full functionality? There should be an immediate reduction in the subscription/purchase price for all users until excel
returns to full functionality. Hey - using your voting logic, users should then be able to vote on whether you have actually indeed restored functionality, and you may not reinstate the full price until there are 'more votes'.
It is not a reality TV show - this is a monumental stuff up by your organisation - it is not your customers' responsibility to 'vote' to fix it. It is up to you to direct resources to restoring the full functionality of the previous edition.
Only when this is done, should your design team with kooky ideas go their hardest at devising strange new ways to 'rejuvinate, revitalise' or whatever other stupid buzz words they were given at the 'redesign excel for 2016' planning meeting.
Can you please provide a response as to when this functionality will be restored.