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

Anonymous

2018-03-21T13:36:29+00:00

I see that this issue is not only me but many many more than I thought. Summarising my issues since I purchased the Office Home/Student version I had issues. First started with Word crashing at every new sheet opened. Now some essential and basic functions are not working. Beside 1 good operator at call centre helping at its best, I was asked: 1) reinstall Office (done) 2) then reinstall Your operating system (done) 3) install again Office (done). All this took the time and therefore blocked all my work, once all procedures where done and endless emails, only after 2 months they answered me - Go ahead and proceed with legal actions since issue we are not able to solve. Therefore I am willing to commence a class action against Microsoft so for whom is interested contact me on ******@gmail.com ......I guess we'll have to take the bull from the horns!!

Experience with Microsoft.......terrible is a compliment!!!
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Anonymous

2018-03-20T19:33:59+00:00

Excel 2016 is so awful that I'm learning to code in Python and R so that I don't have to use it anymore. Seriously--I'm learning to code specifically so that I don't have to use Excel.

Autosave only works if I store my Excel files on OneDrive or Sharepoint (to keep those subscription dollars rolling in, no doubt). That's annoying enough, but the fact that Excel crashes ~50% of the time when an update is ready to install makes it infuriating. In the past 4 months alone, I've lost no less than 16 hours of work from 4 crashes. The latest being 3 hours of lost work today. But hey, what's three hours of wasted time between a captive software user and a software company that views is customers as little more than recurring revenue sources, right?

No need for me to repeat everyone else's complaints here. I do share many of them. But the fact that this product has been so bad, in so many ways, for so long, makes it impossible for me to believe that Microsoft wants Excel to work well on a Mac: Only well enough to keep people from making the effort to learn better ways of manipulating data.

This awful, awful product has forced me to start learning some of the (many) better ways. I look forward to the day that I no longer need Excel for anything other than looking at other people's spreadsheets.
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Jim G 134K Reputation points MVP

2018-02-05T04:47:40+00:00

What, in particular, do you find that's slow in Excel?
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Anonymous

2018-02-03T02:39:03+00:00

I am voting with my feet. I am going to try OpenOffice.

Alternatively I might try and reload Office for Mac2011. But why do I have to do this? Don't they have quality control at MS?
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Anonymous

2018-02-03T00:16:07+00:00

Yup. Brutal. Cost me so much time today. Dont upgrade.
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