Why is Excel 2016 for Mac so bad?

.... and this just in.

A third culprit has been identified. It is corruption in the user account. See this thread

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/copy-and-paste-slow-in-excel-1620-on-mac/5014d977-f96e-4716-8133-3faa3dc29ce0

Hi Joe and Kenneth

So far two culprits have been identified in slow copy/paste with Excel.

One problem is related to Mac OS HandOff

How to **Use Handoff** Between a **Mac** with **Mac** **OS X** and iPhone ...

A different problem with the same symptoms is an unidentified 3rd party menu management tool.

Very few people are affected by the problem, and so far it seems to be external to Excel where keyboard input is intercepted and acted upon before Excel receives the input from Mac OS, which is slowing things way down.

The jury is still out. We don't know all the causes. We do know very few are affected and so far the problem is external to Excel. The hunt for all causes continues.

re: CUT AND PASTE

I have the same problem with Excel v. 16 and it's been around for what seems like a long time. The secret is to pause for about 2 seconds after "copy" before you paste, that usually works without the beachball delay. Unfortunately, it shouldn't require this, and when like me you're concentrating on work and getting things done, you may often just copy/cut and paste quickly, as we're accustomed to doing with most Mac applications. 

Word used to have a similar problem with cut and paste, and still does in limited situations, when you paste "too quickly", especially the first cut and paste after you've opened Word. Until a few years ago, cut and pasting too quickly in Word was almost guaranteed to crash it.

Only Office apps seem to have this elementary problem. Most developers have long ago mastered this seemingly simple function. My guess is that Microsoft uses its own code instead of the OS X built in interface tools. (sorry I don't know the technical way to describe some of this). And the reason for that is probably that Office for Mac is a port of the WIndows code for Word and Excel, with the one exception that the drop down menus remain in place. Microsoft kept the menus so that they could describe Office for Mac as "unmistakably Mac", when in fact it's not at all.

As a side comment, the most obvious problem with the ribbon (and with the Office for Mac drop down menus which are separately included in every window instead of appearing in a proper menu bar) is the workflow interruption that results when you don't have the Word or Excel window at full width. This is another Windows interface feature. Some of the ribbon functions and menus disappear and can't be found until you realize what a "mistake" you've made by using slightly narrowed windows. Just another way to interrupt your workflow. 

Thanks so much. That does seem to make a difference but it really shouldn't be necessary with an expensive ubiquitous program like Office 365. btw in response to another comment I switched on Activity Monitor during the minor operation of opening a tiny Excel file and it appears that this occupies more than 100% of the CPU: https://www.dropbox.com/s/8g73ygzy3qqyv2b/Activity%20Monitor%20Opening%20Excel%20File.png?dl=0

Regards

Joe Earle

re: CUT AND PASTE

I have the same problem with Excel v. 16 and it's been around for what seems like a long time. The secret is to pause for about 2 seconds after "copy" before you paste, that usually works without the beachball delay. Unfortunately, it shouldn't require this, and when like me you're concentrating on work and getting things done, you may often just copy/cut and paste quickly, as we're accustomed to doing with most Mac applications. 

Word used to have a similar problem with cut and paste, and still does in limited situations, when you paste "too quickly", especially the first cut and paste after you've opened Word. Until a few years ago, cut and pasting too quickly in Word was almost guaranteed to crash it.

Only Office apps seem to have this elementary problem. Most developers have long ago mastered this seemingly simple function. My guess is that Microsoft uses its own code instead of the OS X built in interface tools. (sorry I don't know the technical way to describe some of this). And the reason for that is probably that Office for Mac is a port of the WIndows code for Word and Excel, with the one exception that the drop down menus remain in place. Microsoft kept the menus so that they could describe Office for Mac as "unmistakably Mac", when in fact it's not at all.

As a side comment, the most obvious problem with the ribbon (and with the Office for Mac drop down menus which are separately included in every window instead of appearing in a proper menu bar) is the workflow interruption that results when you don't have the Word or Excel window at full width. This is another Windows interface feature. Some of the ribbon functions and menus disappear and can't be found until you realize what a "mistake" you've made by using slightly narrowed windows. Just another way to interrupt your workflow.

Hi Tunecrew

I, too, am a very heavy user of Excel.

The entire code base of Excel was replaced during the life of Office 2016. Excel 2016 started off as single-core 32-bit code from Office for Mac 2011. The final 2016 Excel is multi-core 64-bit code - the exact same code base as Excel for Windows. I don't see how a reasonable person can dismiss completely replacing the code base as "no change whatsoever." It's the most dramatic change I think could ever happen.

When XL 2016 first came out, my 550,000 row data table could not be analyzed in Excel for Mac. Excel for Mac would not generate or display a single pivottable or chart from that data set. Excel for Windows could and did. Using that same data set in the final build of Excel 2016 for Mac I was able to build pivottables, charts, pivotcharts, and slicers. Everything worked as fast on my Mac as it did in Excel for Windows. That is a dramatic improvement.

Another workbook I use has more than 10,000 dependent calculations that cacluate upon every change in the workbook. It is instantaneous in Excel for Mac.

I read just about every post for Excel for Mac here in the forum. The number of reports of crashes and/or freezes is at an all time low. I don't know of any repeatable crashes directly relating to Excel in current updates of Excel 2016 or 2019 for Mac. This is the first time I have said this since Excel was first marketed in 1985.

Currently, a handful of users are experiencing delays with cut/copy/paste. Trying to decipher what is different about Excel for this handful of users is ongoing. A couple days ago one affected user isolated the problem to a 3rd party menu management tool they were using. When the menu management tool was turned off, Excel responded normally. This is still an open issue without a firm resolution for all affected users. One of the selling points of Mac OS X from OS 9 is that  application interference is not supposed to be able to happen. It's possible this could be an Apple Mac OS bug. It's too soon to tell.

This forum offers a different kind of support from the support you have already sought. Here you can share your issues with other users of Excel. If nothing else, your experiences can be verified on a wide variety of installed systems. I do not work for Microsoft and have no inkling as to what you have reported or the response you have received except for what you stated.

If you have a reproducible problem, please post a new question in the forum. Describe the steps it takes to reproduce the problem, the version of Excel (from the Excel menu choose About Excel), the version of Mac OS, and a link to a sanitized copy of the workbook in question. By "sanitized" I mean a workbook that exhibits the problem but has no confidential or private information in it. I and others will take a look and try to reproduce the problem on our Macs and offer comments and suggestions. If nothing else, additional problem reports will be generated and sent to Microsoft. If you are using a machine in Insider Fast, please post those questions to the Insider forum, not the general release forum, as the two forums are supported differently and the Insider builds of Excel are always different from general release builds. One problem per question, please.

It's difficult to know exactly why Microsoft chose to sandbox Office for Mac. There might have been or still might be a desire to market Office for Mac in the Apple store. It could simply be that Microsoft did not want to suffer the bad press that might come if they didn't comply. Maybe it was a matter of price - perhaps Apple wanted more $$ than Microsoft was willing to pay for being in the Apple Mac App store. Maybe there's something else unrelated that we simply don't know. I do know that sandboxing wrecked a lot of automation scenarios and is a real drag when the Office apps open. The conspiracy theorist in me wants to believe Apple invented sandboxing as a way to wreck Microsoft Office and force Microsoft to spend a lot of money just to keep the product alive. The kinder/gentler voice in my head argues that Apple sincerely thinks sandboxing enhances security and is worth the trade-off in broken applications.