Why is Excel 2016 for Mac so bad?

You can't apologize for this rich company.  ALL other third party apps on my mac work flawlessly. What MS's excuse again?  Arrogance?  Don't ship have baked ****.

I really did not like MS forcing me to upgrade for Excel 2011 to 2016. having done so I amn doubly resentful. Not only is it a whole lot more expensive but its is terrible. I am on a Mac and if MS think this is going to forces me back into Windows they are very mistaken. It merely confirms my original decision to leave Windows. Incidentally I have to have (not for much longer!) Win10 on my Mac (in Oracle VirtualBox) and as an OS it sucks. 

1. Auto-recover used to be in a folder of your choice. Now it is somewhere in the MS cloud. I couldn't find it and as soon as you aren't on line guess what ? No auto-recover. That sucks. I now have to remember to save every 5 minutes just like in the late 80's. That sucks. Two days ago I closed a file by mistake and lost 2 hours work. Auto-Recover, allegedly on, was wholly useless. That sucked.
2. What propelled me into this whinge is I am working on a big spreadsheet and trying to select big blocks of data. Dragging the cursor off the edge of the screen doesn't work properly any more. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn't. It wastes my time and it sucks.

3.Writing formulae is a whole lot harder. The cursor cannot easily be  placed on a cell directly adjacent  to the cell you are trying to write a formula for. That wastes my time and it sucks.

4. Opening files is a whole lot more clunky. It is probably 2 or 3 more clicks than in Office for Mac 2011 (which I had no complaints about). That sucks. I wish I could go back. 
5. With the latest update when you click "Save as" Excel now adds "Copy Of" to the front of the file name. That wastes my time and it sucks.

There are other issues too. But heck, I am meant to be working, not whinging.

Ditto Brother,

I never trashed my 2011 office for Mac version.  Is it possible to reactivate it and forget about 2016?

Jim, what do think?

Mike

I am staggered by the length of time this issue has gone on for.  I have Excel for 2011 on my iMac and 2016 on my MacBook Pro and have been contributing to the MS Excel forum for some time (probably since 2011).

The big issues are:

1.  Macro design has been crippled by the simple and effective removal of the "use relative references" button when recording.
2.  Macros design has been further crippled by the removal of the facility to design User Forms.
3.  Most if not all of the shortcut keys are either differently allocated or deleted.

There are many other small differences which I find daily.  I am considering alternative software (such as LibreOffice) - you don't have to buy Microsoft products!

The sale of this crippled software I believe is a scam and there is talk of a class action against MS for selling it without informing MS's dedicated consumer base.

I just upgraded to High Sierra and Office 2016 and I can't believe how horrible Excel is. It barely functions at all. I have a huge list of things that don't work or work at the speed of a slug, but I'm pessimistic that Microsoft technical support can help. 

I agree that the pressure needs to be kept on them to get this product to actually do what the older versions could easily do. I just came off of Office for Mac 2004 and that worked fine. I'm having to keep my old computer set up so I can do work in Excel. Microsoft should be ashamed of itself. 

I have not upgraded to the latest version, which I think is 16.9, because I would lose some of my fonts in Word (don't get me started about how badly that works.) But I'd like to hear from others who are at that version to see if Excel is any better. Maybe there's a way I can update just Excel and leave Word, and my fonts, alone.

Thanks for whatever help you can give.  

   Marki

I agree with the OP.

This Office 365 version of Excel for Mac (version as of Nov 2017) has more bugs than a bait store.

Glitchy screen motion, occasional freezes, a filter that doesn't work as advertised. These are just the things I can remember right now, as they've just happened to me - again.

Yes, it's totally updated, yes my Mac is modern, running latest High Sierra. Everything's up to the minute.

And yes, I've used Excel on Windows quite a bit, so I have firm expectations of how it should run.

There are only two logical explanations for this infliction upon the Excel-using Mac community....

1. MS really are trying to subtly pressure Mac users into giving up their machines and buying a M$ device.
2. MS didn't want to spend the time and/or money to roll out a finished product, realizing that their Mac customers would serve as a hapless and increasingly frustrated bunch of beta testers for them. Why spend the money when the customers will test it for you, and pay you for it at the same time??

Look - if you rolled out any non-software product with these bugs - a car, a table, a piece of computer hardware.....it would all be sent back, and the customers would go somewhere else.

It may be time to find other office software.

It may be time for MS to get off their laurels and actually do some work.