Why is Excel 2016 for Mac so bad?

Anonymous
2016-08-27T19:22:32+00:00

I'm wondering what people think - Excel 2016 for Mac seems to be so bad that it must be intentional. Am I wrong? Is Microsoft still waging a low-grade war on Mac users by making their products subtly awful on a Mac? Is it just that they have really bad developers? Is it that the developers are good but the management somehow makes them do terrible work? Is it that whoever is in charge of designing Excel for Mac has an ex who uses it for his/her job and this person has devoted his/her life to making his/her ex's life bad in confusing ways? Has a nefarious actor infiltrated Microsoft in order to make their products just bad enough that companies will continue to use them but their awfulness will create a small long-term drag on the US economy? Answers would be appreciated. Thanks!

Microsoft 365 and Office | Excel | For home | MacOS

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  1. Anonymous
    2018-09-16T14:48:23+00:00

    I have 2011 on my iMac and 2016 on my Macbook Pro.  Neither have the important VBA functions i need - user forms, data input forms etc.  Apart from that i have not noticed any other differences in functionality! Both are very poor versions of the Excel i used to use in Windows and MS should refund their customers immediately from buying either AND provide a FREE copy of the new version when it finally rolls out to compensate our losses.  It is a disgrace and morally wrong to sell an “upgrade” such as these two versions when MS must have known they were functionally crippled.

    This will drive MS cuatomers away.  I am already installing alternatives for testing prior to the major Apple upgrade next year.  I cannot afford to mess around with this nonsense.

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  2. Anonymous
    2018-09-16T08:10:52+00:00

    I’m still using Office 2011 (including Outlook) as Office 2016 is execrable. Even Excel’s (2016) better scrolling behaviour with large spreadsheets doesn’t compensate for its poor usability. However, the problems with Office for Mac are historic and deep rooted. Apple’s insistence on dismissing dialogue boxes between searches (for example) slows me down far more than any other defect although there’s no reason why MS could not implement searching for all instances of a query with one search request!

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  3. Jim G 134K Reputation points MVP
    2018-06-11T15:12:09+00:00

    I am sure if it were easy to make happen, Microsoft would have given us live preview ages ago. Although I personally asked for this at a meeting with Microsoft reps. in UserVoice there is little demand. I would love it, though.

    Sometimes a new feature gets introduced that has questionable value. For example, the annoying toolbar that displays wherever the cursor is in Office for Windows is liked by some, but not very many. Same with filter buttons on PivotCharts. They are rarely used, and after slicers were introduced to offer the same functionality, Microsoft decided not to put the filter buttons on PivotCharts on the Mac. Personally, I agree and consider those features very annoying clutter.

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  4. Jim G 134K Reputation points MVP
    2018-06-10T16:26:51+00:00

    Hi mintymiller,

    Good point. While this forum lets us jawbone, there is a UserVoice forum Microsoft uses to receive feature requests. For Excel, it is

    Excel for Mac

    Live previews is one of my own high priority wishes, yet I don't even see a suggestion for it. If you put a suggestion for Live previews and reply here with the link I will certainly vote for the suggestion and make comments encouraging implementation.

    Same thing with Find All. Make a feature request.

    You can use VBA to Find All

    https://www.thespreadsheetguru.com/the-code-vault/2014/4/21/find-all-instances-with-vba

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  5. Anonymous
    2018-06-10T15:11:23+00:00

    I posted my complaints about the software some time ago and it continues to attract responses. I don’t know whether or not it’s Microsoft’s fault but there are two features on Windows versions that I would like to see on the Mac versions. One is live previews, available since at least Win Office 2010. The other is the ability to scroll, select in Excel etc without having to dismiss a dialogue box each time. The Find function for example needs this and it might be the reason a ‘find all’ feature still isn’t available on Mac versions. If I have lots of find/replace work to do in Excel, I usually use a Win version. Same with Powerpoint, where the live preview function greatly speeds things up.

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