Why is Excel 2016 for Mac so bad?

Hi PKaaaaay,

When I drag while selecting cells the window scrolls. Could you go to the Excel menu and choose About Excel and reply with the version of Excel you have? You should not be having a problem with scrolling while selecting cells.

I think it is because lack of competition on the market = no improvement. Since Microsoft Office is a monopolist, we costumers are being ripped. They simply have no incentive to improve. 

Yes I totally agree the quality of Microsoft Office on Mac is disgusting. It is the only application on my Mac that regularly crashes.

I would recommend to buy a windows laptop.

So i've been reading through this thread out of frustration.

Latest Office 365 on latest Mojave on latest top of the line built to order MacBook Pro (although it doesn't matter, I have installs on several different Macs w/ High Sierra and Mojave and the problems are consistent). FYI I'm also an experienced software engineer.

I use Excel heavily - large spreadsheets with multiple worksheets and calculations. It becomes essentially unusable long before the sheets get very large. Bugs, glitches, crashes, freezes. Please note that many times when it freezes (large pastes, etc.) the cpu is NOT being fully utilised, there is available RAM so no swapping, etc. It's just poor code. I don't know how you can claim it has improved, even since 2016.

I have reported bugs, emailed directly w/ persons at MS, etc. No response or fixes ever. My team has already switched anything small and lightweight to Google Sheets, and as that product improves we will hopefully never have to use Excel again. I'm not sure if MS appreciates how the few complaints on forums like these are just the tip of an iceberg of users that absolutely HATE Microsoft products.

What I really don't get, though, is the constant complaint about sandboxing - Office is not available in the App Store, so why sandbox it? Don't blame Apple, blame Microsoft for doing something unnecessary.

It used to be the most influential people with Microsoft were MVPs and some large customers. That changed when Microsoft opened the Office Insider program to everyone. Now anyone who is interested can participate with the Microsoft developers in guiding Microsoft's development efforts. It does take some dedication to providing quality feedback. They want feedback on new features, bugs, and undiscovered problems via the Smile button in the Insider Fast builds. There is always the risk that an Insider build will have big problems, but I think that risk is small these days.

What is Office Insider? - Office Support

If you think Office apps are taking too long to launch, you should send that feedback via the Smile button in each Insider Fast app.

If you are the administrator of an Office 365 subscription, follow the product feed in the Office 365 Message center. You'll find announcements of upcoming features and product changes.

Regarding "bloat" - that's a touchy subject. When Microsoft product managers hear complaints about "bloat" their reaction is, "What features can we cut?" I'm of the ilk that the biggest problem with Office for Mac is features that are missing compared with Office for Windows. My take is that we don't have all the features. I don't think we have too many features.I suspect that for each feature you call "bloat" and are willing to say goodbye to that there are others who would scoff and say the feature you don't want is essential.

In terms of quality, I think the initial release of Office 2016 for Mac was the worst commercial product I ever used. It crashed. It was crippled in many ways. In my mind it replaced Netscape 6 as the worst product I ever used. I feared that Office for Mac would languish and wind up the way Netscape did - as a browser that almost no one uses.

Fortunately, Microsoft's Mac customers made a big fuss and Microsoft listened. In the past 3 years Microsoft changed just about everything about Office for Mac. The original 2016 code base was the Mac code base from Office 2011. A little more than a year ago the entire code base was scrapped and replaced with the same code base as Office 2016 64-bit for Windows. Word, Excel and PowerPoint are completely different apps now from when Office 2016 was initially released. This has allowed the feature set of Office for Mac to rapidly match Windows Office almost feature for feature. There are still many features that are not implemented, but Microsoft is working on them.

IMHO the quality of Office for Mac has gone from worst ever software that I ever used to among the very best software I have ever used. Every week I get a new build in Insider Fast. Every week there are new features and the product gets better and more stable.

There used to be thousands of crashes reported in the forum. Now there are very few, and almost all of them are corrected by installing updates. The most common problems I see lately have to do with Mojave and printer drivers, and these are things that are largely out of Microsoft's control. Other common problems are related to Apple's sandboxing security scheme. I don't know whether or not Apple set out to wreck Microsoft Office with their sandboxing scheme, but it sure is a PITA and is a major contributor to Office apps taking a long time to launch.

I'm sorry if you don't see how much Office for Mac has changed in the past 3 years. I see an entirely new product that I think Microsoft can be proud of. In just the past few months we have a shiny new Visual Basic Editor and support for almost all new formulas in Excel, with Maps in testing in Insider Fast right now. In additiion to Visual Basic for Applications, you can now automate Office for Mac in AppleScript,, JavaScript and even Objective-C on the Mac using Apple's Script Editor. That's huge!

This tells me they are not sitting around sipping caffeine and eating donuts and Microsoft. They might be drinking some fine wine.