Why is Excel 2016 for Mac so bad?

After 2 months of running around came to the final conclusion that MS has no interest in solving issues of the program office. Since early start the program begun giving issues and reckless emails and calls worth zero. Now again and this time not Word but Excel failing to work with some basic issues. Summarising: 1) Operators asked me to re-install office (done no solution) 2) Then asked me to re install operating system (done) 3) Install older versions (done - no solution) 4) We are sorry but we can't solve the problem....go ahead and sue us - we can't solve the problem and frankly we don't care(this was the general summary). Well folks I am working to commence a class action against MS as I see many many many people lament issues and MS not caring in whatsoever . Contact me on ******@gmail.com if interested in gathering compensation for loss of business and opportunities, time spent and foolish company dealing with the issue with no care!!

Hi Alex, added You on list. Will get back at You but Kindly send me an email to send You info and updates!!

I am staggered by the length of time this issue has gone on for.  I have Excel for 2011 on my iMac and 2016 on my MacBook Pro and have been contributing to the MS Excel forum for some time (probably since 2011).

The big issues are:

1.  Macro design has been crippled by the simple and effective removal of the "use relative references" button when recording.
2.  Macros design has been further crippled by the removal of the facility to design User Forms.
3.  Most if not all of the shortcut keys are either differently allocated or deleted.

There are many other small differences which I find daily.  I am considering alternative software (such as LibreOffice) - you don't have to buy Microsoft products!

The sale of this crippled software I believe is a scam and there is talk of a class action against MS for selling it without informing MS's dedicated consumer base.

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

It's general running, for starters.

I use Excel 2011 for mac to manage a taxi fleet. Admittedly the document is large and complex, but its confined to only typical formulae. No macros or anything. On the same computer Excel 2011 runs the document without issue while the excel from Office 2016 can't run the document in any usable way. There exists a myriad of problems which include but are not limited to:

• Switching between sheets incurs white screen latency of about 8 seconds.
• Scrolling down a sheet is abominably slow and can in fact crash the program.
• Selecting a cell with any sort of nested formula can take between 2 and 10 seconds to show in the formula box.

Yes, I did spend about 18 hours rebuilding the document from scratch in case there was some kind of corruption.

No, Office 2016's Excel, even then, couldn't handle the complexity of the document.

The fact of the matter is that the version of excel in Office 2016 is in NO WAY (at least in my experience) an upgrade from the excel in Office for Mac 2011. Aside from it's inability to run, there are simple features the 2011 version has that the 2016 version does not. Why, for the love of god, is there no single page view?

A little over a year ago when I discovered all of this I was fortunate enough to come across a Microsoft employee who, despite informing me that the 2011 version was no longer available for purchase, allowed me to download it as part of my office 365 subscription. That suited me just fine. Until now.

Mac releases High Sierra. Such is the imminent demise of 32-bit programs. Upon learning of Mac's elitist policies regarding this, I find my way to this thread, hoping against hope, that in the mean time Microsoft has fixed all the problems I discovered back then.

No such luck. Instead I find a forum MVP insisting over and over that the problems don't exist. Woe is me.

Fortunately for Microsoft, I think their inability(disinterest?) in creating a truly cross platform experience, is less hateful than Mac's elitist policies regarding 32-bit programming. So my path forward will likely result in me moving off Mac rather than moving away from office. Although I haven't spent much time in the excel for windows, it may yet incentivise me to move away from office all together.

Hi mijochda ,

You bring up several different issues. Maybe we can work through them.

May I assume you are using Excel with the latest update, which is 16.3.1? Version 16.14 is currently available in Insider Slow and will go out to everyone in the next week or two.

What is Office Insider? - Office Support

You can find the version information by going to the Excel menu and choosing About Excel. If your experience is with any other version, I recommend that you go to the Help menu and choose Check for Updates to launch AutoUpdate and let it install updates. Then restart your Mac and try the problem workbook again.

I have noticed an occasional post here in the forums from people who find Word or Excel to be excruciatingly slow for no obvious reason. Excel 2016 for Mac runs just fine for me and I have not been able to replicate these issues on any of my Macs. I use a workbook having more than 10,000 dependent cell formulas and its operation is instantaneous. I use data sets of more than 500,000 rows and more than 100 columns where calculation is very fast - every bit as fast as Excel for Windows (we now have multiple core calculations). These workbooks have multiple PivotTables and charts. If you are willing to share the problem workbook, please remove personal or confidential information first, then put it onto a share site such as DropBox or OneDrive and provide the download link so everyone interested can try it on their Mac to see how it behaves.

While you were reconstructing your workbook, did you notice what formula or something you did in the workbook led to the slowdown? I assume it worked fast up to a certain point, then something changed. You said there is complexity that you think is slowing it down. Is there something specific you have in mind?

You mentioned Views. Excel 2011 has two views: Normal and Page Layout. There is no "Single Page" view. Excel 2016 has the same two views plus a old one that was reincarnated from 2008 and earlier, Page Break Preview. I'll need your help to understand what you mean by Single Page view.

Old builds of Excel 2016 had major scrolling problems in Page Layout view. To the best of my knowledge, the scrolling problem has been fixed. I don't see complaints about it any more (except for yours).

I do not claim these problems don't exist for you. I will claim that the root cause of the problems you are having can be identified and perhaps corrected. When there is a large factor of uniqueness, it is sometimes difficult to suggest the right thing that fixes the trouble right off the bat. Unfortunately, this involves using a process of elimination that has many possible branches.

Operations that can affect speed that come to mind are: workbook corruption, workbook content, font problems, lack of updates, file system corruption, faulty install of Office or Mac OS.

You have taken a good approach toward your troubleshooting. Testing in Excel 2011 where there's no speed issue points a finger at something going wrong in Excel 2016 on your Mac. If you can find another Mac having the same update 16.13.1 of XL 2016 and open the workbook on the other Mac, is it still slow?

If it works fast on another Mac, then we can focus on the install of Office, Mac OS and your fonts. If the same slowness appears, it could be a problem with the workbook. Then we can focus on finding what it is about the workbook that is causing the slowdown.

Another troubleshooting step to take is to boot to Safe Mode by restarting your Mac while holding the SHIFT key down. Your Mac will take a long time to start up, as Disk Utility runs in the background and fixes your file system, if necessary. The font cache is emptied, too. Then try the workbook while in Safe Mode. Is it any better or just the same?

More radical troubleshooting can involve making a new Mac OS User account and testing there, uninstall/reinstall of Office, reinstall system fonts, look crosswise at your font management tool (some of them have weird interactions with other apps for some reason), reinstall MacOS. I admit that there are a couple of users who have tried everything, and for some reason there is still extreme slowness on their Macs. In these rare cases you an join Insider Fast and interact directly with the developer teams at Microsoft to try to solve mysterious issues.

Recently, the object model of Excel 2016 for Mac was upgraded to the same object model as Excel 2016 for Windows. The cross-platform experience is not 100% yet, but with each update, Microsoft is bringing the Mac version closer and closer to the Windows feature set. I haven't tested, but I think using Control-e now works to use Flash Fill in the 16.13.1 update. If it does, this is a major cross-platform milestone. If you open a workbook having a Data Model in 16.13.1 you won't get a dialog warning you that your workbook has an unsupported feature. The Data Model doesn't work, but now Excel for Mac lets you at least open the workbook without removing the data model. Some data model features are in the interface, but they are turned off. It is obvious this enormous feature is being worked on and will go live, eventually.

The 32-bit program support issue and its resulting problems with old software is strictly Apple's idea. Mac OS 10.14 may or may not support 32-bit applications. My hunch is that Apple is playing a "wait-and-see" game to see how strongly Mac users push back against the idea of losing 32-bit applications. As with Rosetta, there isn't a technical reason why 32-bit apps can't run. It's a marketing decision.