Why is Excel 2016 for Mac so bad?

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.

That’s just too much trouble and cost. It’s a scandalous rip-off. I didn’t mention it last time but none of the problems I listed before were problems with earlier versions of Office and IOS.

Stop speculating and get answers. If you're in the meetings, get the answers! Put pressure on MS to deliver an excellent product. I have used Office for decades and I have had a Mac since the IIsi. The product from MS worked better, launched faster, and was far more stable than on the Windows based machines. The last 10 years of MS seems that everything they touch gets bloated and doesn't play well with others. It's as if the folks at your meetings and the coders would rather spend more time scarfing down KrispyKreme's that writing decent code.

It used to be the most influential people with Microsoft were MVPs and some large customers. That changed when Microsoft opened the Office Insider program to everyone. Now anyone who is interested can participate with the Microsoft developers in guiding Microsoft's development efforts. It does take some dedication to providing quality feedback. They want feedback on new features, bugs, and undiscovered problems via the Smile button in the Insider Fast builds. There is always the risk that an Insider build will have big problems, but I think that risk is small these days.

What is Office Insider? - Office Support

If you think Office apps are taking too long to launch, you should send that feedback via the Smile button in each Insider Fast app.

If you are the administrator of an Office 365 subscription, follow the product feed in the Office 365 Message center. You'll find announcements of upcoming features and product changes.

Regarding "bloat" - that's a touchy subject. When Microsoft product managers hear complaints about "bloat" their reaction is, "What features can we cut?" I'm of the ilk that the biggest problem with Office for Mac is features that are missing compared with Office for Windows. My take is that we don't have all the features. I don't think we have too many features.I suspect that for each feature you call "bloat" and are willing to say goodbye to that there are others who would scoff and say the feature you don't want is essential.

In terms of quality, I think the initial release of Office 2016 for Mac was the worst commercial product I ever used. It crashed. It was crippled in many ways. In my mind it replaced Netscape 6 as the worst product I ever used. I feared that Office for Mac would languish and wind up the way Netscape did - as a browser that almost no one uses.

Fortunately, Microsoft's Mac customers made a big fuss and Microsoft listened. In the past 3 years Microsoft changed just about everything about Office for Mac. The original 2016 code base was the Mac code base from Office 2011. A little more than a year ago the entire code base was scrapped and replaced with the same code base as Office 2016 64-bit for Windows. Word, Excel and PowerPoint are completely different apps now from when Office 2016 was initially released. This has allowed the feature set of Office for Mac to rapidly match Windows Office almost feature for feature. There are still many features that are not implemented, but Microsoft is working on them.

IMHO the quality of Office for Mac has gone from worst ever software that I ever used to among the very best software I have ever used. Every week I get a new build in Insider Fast. Every week there are new features and the product gets better and more stable.

There used to be thousands of crashes reported in the forum. Now there are very few, and almost all of them are corrected by installing updates. The most common problems I see lately have to do with Mojave and printer drivers, and these are things that are largely out of Microsoft's control. Other common problems are related to Apple's sandboxing security scheme. I don't know whether or not Apple set out to wreck Microsoft Office with their sandboxing scheme, but it sure is a PITA and is a major contributor to Office apps taking a long time to launch.

I'm sorry if you don't see how much Office for Mac has changed in the past 3 years. I see an entirely new product that I think Microsoft can be proud of. In just the past few months we have a shiny new Visual Basic Editor and support for almost all new formulas in Excel, with Maps in testing in Insider Fast right now. In additiion to Visual Basic for Applications, you can now automate Office for Mac in AppleScript,, JavaScript and even Objective-C on the Mac using Apple's Script Editor. That's huge!

This tells me they are not sitting around sipping caffeine and eating donuts and Microsoft. They might be drinking some fine wine.

So i've been reading through this thread out of frustration.

Latest Office 365 on latest Mojave on latest top of the line built to order MacBook Pro (although it doesn't matter, I have installs on several different Macs w/ High Sierra and Mojave and the problems are consistent). FYI I'm also an experienced software engineer.

I use Excel heavily - large spreadsheets with multiple worksheets and calculations. It becomes essentially unusable long before the sheets get very large. Bugs, glitches, crashes, freezes. Please note that many times when it freezes (large pastes, etc.) the cpu is NOT being fully utilised, there is available RAM so no swapping, etc. It's just poor code. I don't know how you can claim it has improved, even since 2016.

I have reported bugs, emailed directly w/ persons at MS, etc. No response or fixes ever. My team has already switched anything small and lightweight to Google Sheets, and as that product improves we will hopefully never have to use Excel again. I'm not sure if MS appreciates how the few complaints on forums like these are just the tip of an iceberg of users that absolutely HATE Microsoft products.

What I really don't get, though, is the constant complaint about sandboxing - Office is not available in the App Store, so why sandbox it? Don't blame Apple, blame Microsoft for doing something unnecessary.

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.