Why is Excel 2016 for Mac so bad?

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

I would be happy to sign up to a class action law suit against Microsoft for their appalling software which I spent nearly one hundred pounds sterling on.

I see that this issue is not only me but many many more than I thought. Summarising my issues since I purchased the Office Home/Student version I had issues. First started with Word crashing at every new sheet opened. Now some essential and basic functions are not working. Beside 1 good operator at call centre helping at its best, I was asked: 1) reinstall Office (done) 2) then reinstall Your operating system (done) 3) install again Office (done). All this took the time and therefore blocked all my work, once all procedures where done and endless emails, only after 2 months they answered me - Go ahead and proceed with legal actions since issue we are not able to solve. Therefore I am willing to commence a class action against Microsoft so for whom is interested contact me on ******@gmail.com ......I guess we'll have to take the bull from the horns!!

Experience with Microsoft.......terrible is a compliment!!!

Excel 2016 is so awful that I'm learning to code in Python and R so that I don't have to use it anymore. Seriously--I'm learning to code specifically so that I don't have to use Excel.  

Autosave only works if I store my Excel files on OneDrive or Sharepoint (to keep those subscription dollars rolling in, no doubt). That's annoying enough, but the fact that Excel crashes ~50% of the time when an update is ready to install makes it infuriating.  In the past 4 months alone, I've lost no less than 16 hours of work from 4 crashes. The latest being 3 hours of lost work today. But hey, what's three hours of wasted time between a captive software user and a software company that views is customers as little more than recurring revenue sources, right?

No need for me to repeat everyone else's complaints here. I do share many of them. But the fact that this product has been so bad, in so many ways, for so long, makes it impossible for me to believe that Microsoft wants Excel to work well on a Mac: Only well enough to keep people from making the effort to learn better ways of manipulating data.

This awful, awful product has forced me to start learning some of the (many) better ways. I look forward to the day that I no longer need Excel for anything other than looking at other people's spreadsheets.