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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!
A family of Microsoft spreadsheet software with tools for analyzing, charting, and communicating data.
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
'Embedded Objects other than Word or Excel files is not supported on Macs. Other file types cannot be embedded on a Mac & if embedded on a PC they cannot be opened on a Mac.'
Unbelievable. How dreadful this software is for a Mac user. How can you actually charge money for software that does not work? Absolutely shameful .
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.
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
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
I will, but one can’t but wonder why on earth these features are not already in there? What prevents MS from giving Mac users features that Windows users have enjoyed for years?
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
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
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.