Why is Excel 2016 for Mac so bad?

I'm sorry but you are completely wrong on the tasks that work or not in Excel 2016. Wrong since I've had to give up any further due to neglected and no solution (after 10's of emails and calls to customer support) over autofill task just not working at all on Excel. As per this same day it is still not working and Microsoft has made me also re-intall and the package several times, used older versions and made me re-install my OS 2 times. Still no way to make it work on whatsoever case. Once I tab the letter of a word I need to write on each cell, it comes prefixed that Excel should suggest (appears) to autofill the same word and or number. This JUST DOES NOT HAPPEN. Lets not even mention the customer service.......what a disaster!! ps You may want to scroll in the forum here where not only this same Discussion but many many more lamenting a lot of problems on Excel and Word. You work for Microsoft?

I do not work for Microsoft. Any conversations or communication you've had directly with support are not available to me. Those are between you and Microsoft.

Regarding Microsoft support and problems with support, all I can do is refer you to the general support page. I have nothing to do with Microsoft Support:

https://support.office.com/

As i said, Excel is working fine for almost all users. If you can provide an example workbook that exhibits the problem, I'd be happy to try to troubleshoot it with you.

I see tooltips and formula help as expected, always. Even my own user defined worksheet functions work.

I hear your complaints and I am sure what you say is happening, but you've given me nothing to work with to try to help you troubleshoot. My hunch is something is awry within the workbook, which is why I would like to take a crack at it.

Does your machine Jim, by the way,  have an SSD? If so that may be one reason you don't have some issues at least with speed. My new Machine has 16 GB RAm plus a One terabyte SSD. Previously my old Machine had a Standard Hard Drive. On it, you could go up fill the coffee pot with water. Let it make coffee and drink a cup before any Office apps would open. Today the same applications will open and get up to speed before you can blink your eyes twice. 

However, When calculating spreadsheet, it still takes a long time, unless you go into Preferences Calculation and turn on Multithreading. Then and only then does Caluculations run reasonably fast.

It's a known fact since there has been a PC Version, Calculations have always been much faster on PC, and I've used Excel since Excel 5.01a days and Word since 6.01a Days (Circa 1995). I've fathfully used both through every update until now. despite all Mac users have gone through and the treatment we have received from Microsoft, I've continued using Office products. There is no "real" competition at least for Excel and Word. The competition was run off years ago by Microsoft. Now we must accept what is given. The one thing Excel does get some Competition from is in relational databases. And FileMaker smokes Excel so bad on that; Excel will never catch up. The last best competition for Word was WordPerfect and after Corel Bought it and promised continued support. A Certain big company came along and put the fear into them, and they announced the shut down of Mac support before the ink got dry on the WordPerfect Corp and Corel contract. 

I know the phrase I love conspiracy theories will be thrown into the Mix but at the time both MacWorld and MacUser which I subscribed to at the time, wrote about the situation.

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Hi

The machine I use for answering the forums is my pre-retina, pre-SSD MacBook. It does have a graphics card that takes some of the load off the CPU.

Since the recent advent of mutli-threaded calculation and the updating of the Office Object Model so that it is the same as the Windows version, my impression of speed for calculations is that it is pretty much a tie. I haven't done any speed tests, but I suspect if you had boot camp and a workbook designed to test calculation speeds, they would be pretty close.

In terms of databases, please keep in mind that worksheets do cell formulas. Databases do not. It is not reasonable to expect a Excel that does a bazillion more things in cells than database programs to be as fast with just data.

That said, in Excel 2016 for Windows, there is a different way to have tables called the Data Model. The Data Model does not do calculations and works as fast as any dedicated database program. Microsoft is in the process of hooking up the data model in Excel for Mac. In 16.14 you will no longer get a warning that content will be lost if there is a data model in a workbook. Some data model features are visible now, but they are not working. For example, a PivotTable based on a Data Model will display, as will its slicers, but the interactivity and calculation is not working, yet. It is obvious Microsoft has done a ton of work on this, and it continues.

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.