Why is Excel 2016 for Mac so bad?

Anonymous

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!

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114 answers

Jim G 134K Reputation points MVP

2018-10-07T13:50:06+00:00

Unfortunately, the VBA implementation in LibreOffice Calc is worse than in Excel for Mac. When they set up VBA in Calc, LibreOffice made some horrible choices. Instead of making userforms that work everywhere, they work ONLY in Calc! Userforms made in Excel don't work in Calc. Not only that, they chose to implement VBA only in Calc and not in Writer or Presenter. Within VBA you can't call one sub from another, there's no AutoOpen or AutoClose. These factors make VBA in Calc unusable, IMHO.
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Anonymous

2018-10-07T08:06:35+00:00

I have two Apple devices - an imac bought in 2011 with excel v 2011 and a macbook pro with 2016. Both machines have macos high sierra loaded.

my only problems are that the 2016 excel is very limited when using VBA - no user forms and no data entry form. The 2011 version has these features and any VBA code writing i do is done in 2011.

the 2016 version has no running issues - scroll bars etc are ok.

hoping that microsoft will fix these things is whistling in the wind. Their 2019 version has just come out and it has the same issues as 2016.

i’ve moved to LibreOffice Calc. And Microsoft have lost a customer.
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Anonymous

2018-10-06T22:05:51+00:00

I upgraded from Excel 2011 for Mac to Excel 2016 several months ago. I've used Excel successfully for years and have never had a problem with upgrading until now.

My issues: Scrolling is very laggy and the mouse gets lost. Formatting is lost when I bring up documents from the prior version. I would type in one cell and the data would appear in another; I finally figured out that this was due to column headers, so I have had to remove them. If the column header was three lines, the data would appear in the cell three lines below where it should be.

I've had over 50 contacts with Tech Support, some quite lengthy, and have filed complaints with the BBB - all to no avail. Every time I would contact Tech Support, I would get someone unfamiliar with my situation and I would have to repeat myself. Over and over again, they connect remotely with my computer and pronounce that there is nothing wrong.

Because contacting Tech Support became a colossal waste of time, I've developed my own workarounds, something I shouldn't have to do.
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Jim G 134K Reputation points MVP

2018-10-05T14:07:19+00:00

Embedding in 2019 is the same as 2016 and earlier versions. OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) has not changed. Oddly, I don't see any requests for OLE enhancements at the uservoice feature site. Please feel encouraged to make a feature request here:

Excel for Mac
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Anonymous

2018-10-05T11:23:58+00:00

With the recent release of Office 2019 for Mac, does anyone know if you can now correctly embed excel spreadsheets into word?
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