Why is Excel 2016 for Mac so bad?

Hi Mabi

"All features that are in Excel 2016 work" could be taken to mean "All features that are in Excel 2016 for Windows work in Excel for Mac" or perhaps you mean some features are broken in Excel for Windows.

Either way, not every feature in Excel 2016 for Windows is in Excel for Mac. There are some features that are being worked on that are not fully functional in Excel for Mac. Big ones such as implementation of the Data Model along with Get and Transform are coming. So is the VB Editor so it can make and edit UserForms.

Launch times are slow for Office for Mac. Blame Apple. It's their sandboxing scheme that slows things down due to font handling. I wish Microsoft had told Apple to stick sandboxing where the sun doesn't shine, but they didn't.

Currently, the code base of Office for Mac is the same as Office for Windows. In theory, the Mac version could have all the same features, except portions that code base is based on Windows APIs, which don't exist on the Mac. Microsoft has to build work-arounds to make certain features available (such as the UserForm editor for VBA). That said, the core functionality of Excel is identical to that on Windows and I see no performance difference for Excel formulas and calculations on the Mac vs Windows. I am sure you could devise specific cases where one platform is faster or slower at something than the other, but my overall impression is speed is the same.

As you point out, for decades Excel has been the gold standard for business and education. OpenOffice, which is a copycat product and free, has never made a dent because it is incompatible and incomplete. The same applies to Google's underpowered spreadsheet product. Apple's spreadsheet product is not even a contender.

If you have thoughts about Word, you are invited and encouraged to start a new thread about Word under the Word heading here in the forum.

Thanks Jim, I now understand things a bit better, so this is good to know.  

As for wanting to switch to a different app for spreadsheets and word processing, if you work in business and need to exchange documents with other people, the fact is that .docx and .xlsx are standards in business in North America. In my experience, OpenOffice and various other MS Office clone apps cannot export much of Office app formatting correctly or in some cases at all, and have problems importing the formatting. So regardless of their perceived shortcomings, Word and Excel remain indispensable.

.docs and .xlsx are international standards adopted much to the consternation of OpenOffice advocates who hoped the standards body would adopt .odf format for the standard. Both are text formats using XML.

My OpenOffice experience comes from LibreOffice. I have not experienced formatting issues with LibreOffice. I find compatibility good when I go to LibreOffice preferences and choose to always save in the (incorrectly described) Microsoft Excel 2007-2013 XML (.xlsx) format. It's a shame that OpenOffice is even more PC-Centric than Microsoft Office!

Formatting of worksheets, numbers, conditional formatting all seems pretty good to me.

The main trouble with any OpenOffice app is its lack of automation capabilities. When you check the Scripting dictionary for a Microsoft Office app you find a rich set of AppleScript, JavaScript and now even Objective C capabilities. When you do the same for LibreOffice or OpenOffice, this is what you get:

Talk about software that is flagrantly anti-Apple and anti-Mac!

The VBA implementation in Calc is horrible. They took so many shortcuts that almost nothing works. Sure, they made a userform editor, but OpenOffice/LibreOffice userforms are completely incompatible with Microsoft Office userforms. Why on earth did they even bother?

Anyway, I was trying to give LibreOffice a boost by saying that light-weight spreadsheets should work very well and be cross platform. If you want to make workbooks in LibreOffice you will be fine as long as you don't ever want to use features it doesn't have.

It's pitifully poor. Just for basics: On first use in any Excel session it takes 8 seconds to perform the oh-so-sophisticated difficult function "copy-and-paste" (likewise in Word). Format pasting doesn't even work the first  time, you have to do it twice. This isn't a Word forum but I can't help noticing that in Word e.g. it's no longer possible to suppress page numbers, except on the first page. Alternate page printing doesn't work. I could go on. How can it be so so so so bad with no sign of any effort to put it right? Please stop developing clever-clever add-ons and just MAKE IT WORK!!

My two cents ...

I believe Excel (and other Office products) relies heavily on Windows DLLs for its functionality. They are not available in Mac.

My SOLUTION - I installed Windows on my MacBook Pro using VMWare 10. I use MS Office on Windows. I use Mac for apps I prefer on Mac and Windows for what I prefer on Windoes.