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
    2018-09-18T18:18:36+00:00

    Are you referring to the Find All button in the Excel for Windows search?

    Oddly, I've seen several mentions of this feature here in the Community Forum, but I don't see any requests for this feature in the UserVoice forum, which is specifically to request features. I would definitely vote for implementation of Find All if someone were to post the suggestion here and reply in this forum with a link to the reuqest.

    Excel for Mac

    1. I believe that a "Find All" feature would be useful in Excel for Mac 2016 and would encourage its development by MS
    2. I would like to also strongly recommend that the query feature in Excel for Mac 2016 be immediately upgraded to work in exactly the same way as the feature in MS Excel.

    Mike Forrest

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  2. Jim G 134K Reputation points MVP
    2018-09-17T14:01:15+00:00

    Are you referring to the Find All button in the Excel for Windows search?

    Oddly, I've seen several mentions of this feature here in the Community Forum, but I don't see any requests for this feature in the UserVoice forum, which is specifically to request features. I would definitely vote for implementation of Find All if someone were to post the suggestion here and reply in this forum with a link to the reuqest.

    Excel for Mac

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  3. Anonymous
    2018-09-16T20:14:45+00:00

    I should be more precise. It's dismissal of the search dialogue each time a different term is searched for that distinguishes Windows from Mac versions of Excel and considerably slows it down. I also understand there's a VBA script that can overcome the recovery of just one instance of a search term at a time in Excel for Mac by highlighting them in the spreadsheet itself. But it shouldn't require expertise in VBA to do this;  it should be built in to the dialogue itself as it in in Windows versions at least since v2010, where one can then click on each instance to highlight the corresponding cell. I appreciate that having to dismiss dialogues in Excel for Mac when searching for different strings may not be the fault of MS.

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  4. Jim G 134K Reputation points MVP
    2018-09-16T17:20:57+00:00

    Hi Mnity

    I'm not sure I understand what you mean.

    If you search for something, you can click the arrows to the right inisde the search box to move to the next match or back to a previous match. You can use the keyboard shortcut Command-g to move to the next match, as well.

    If you click the button by the spyglass symbol you can choose Advanced Find or Replace to display the old Find dialog.

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  5. Jim G 134K Reputation points MVP
    2018-09-16T17:13:43+00:00

    @ Mike

    Excel 2011 and 2016 can live together. You can keep them both. They don't interfere with each other. Before updating Mac OS, make sure it supports 32-bit apps because 2011 is 32-bit.

    Your perpetual license never expires.

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