Why is Excel 2016 for Mac so bad?

Anonymous
2016-08-27T19:22:32+00:00

I'm wondering what people think - Excel 2016 for Mac seems to be so bad that it must be intentional. Am I wrong? Is Microsoft still waging a low-grade war on Mac users by making their products subtly awful on a Mac? Is it just that they have really bad developers? Is it that the developers are good but the management somehow makes them do terrible work? Is it that whoever is in charge of designing Excel for Mac has an ex who uses it for his/her job and this person has devoted his/her life to making his/her ex's life bad in confusing ways? Has a nefarious actor infiltrated Microsoft in order to make their products just bad enough that companies will continue to use them but their awfulness will create a small long-term drag on the US economy? Answers would be appreciated. Thanks!

Microsoft 365 and Office | Excel | For home | MacOS

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  1. Jim G 134K Reputation points MVP
    2018-09-19T14:34:08+00:00

    Again - this is a discussion forum. We can all agree among ourselves here regarding features we'd like to see, but the forum Microsoft pays attention regarding feature requests is the Uservoice forum.

    Post the suggestion in the UserVoice forum and reply in this forum with a link to the request. Here's a repeat of the link to the UserVoice forum:

    Excel for Mac

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  2. Anonymous
    2018-09-18T18:18:36+00:00

    Are you referring to the Find All button in the Excel for Windows search?

    Oddly, I've seen several mentions of this feature here in the Community Forum, but I don't see any requests for this feature in the UserVoice forum, which is specifically to request features. I would definitely vote for implementation of Find All if someone were to post the suggestion here and reply in this forum with a link to the reuqest.

    Excel for Mac

    1. I believe that a "Find All" feature would be useful in Excel for Mac 2016 and would encourage its development by MS
    2. I would like to also strongly recommend that the query feature in Excel for Mac 2016 be immediately upgraded to work in exactly the same way as the feature in MS Excel.

    Mike Forrest

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  3. Anonymous
    2018-09-16T20:14:45+00:00

    I should be more precise. It's dismissal of the search dialogue each time a different term is searched for that distinguishes Windows from Mac versions of Excel and considerably slows it down. I also understand there's a VBA script that can overcome the recovery of just one instance of a search term at a time in Excel for Mac by highlighting them in the spreadsheet itself. But it shouldn't require expertise in VBA to do this;  it should be built in to the dialogue itself as it in in Windows versions at least since v2010, where one can then click on each instance to highlight the corresponding cell. I appreciate that having to dismiss dialogues in Excel for Mac when searching for different strings may not be the fault of MS.

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  4. Jim G 134K Reputation points MVP
    2018-09-16T17:13:43+00:00

    @ Mike

    Excel 2011 and 2016 can live together. You can keep them both. They don't interfere with each other. Before updating Mac OS, make sure it supports 32-bit apps because 2011 is 32-bit.

    Your perpetual license never expires.

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  5. Jim G 134K Reputation points MVP
    2018-09-16T17:11:06+00:00

    @ Rod

    You never have to give up Excel 2011. It's easy! You simply keep Mac OS at 10.13.6 or earlier and Excel 14.7.7 will run forever.

    1. AutoRECOVER is the process used to recover flies that were saved to your local drive. This is not gone away.

    AutoSAVE is the process used to recover files that were saved to OndeDrive or SharePoint.

    This topic from Excel Help has the details.

    Recover files in Office for Mac

    1. Not sure what to say about this one. It could me a memory issue. A video processor and RAM issue. If you can nail down a reliable set of steps to reproduce the problem along with an example workbook, that would be really helpful. That kind of issue can be forwarded to the developer team at Microsoft so they can work on it.
    2. Yes. I agree that sucks. Send a frown by clicking the Smile button in Excel.
    3. I also agree. Send a frown. This is a consequence of dumbing things down to make things easier for those who are new or don't use spreadsheets very much. Also, Microsoft wants us to see the beautiful templates they bought for us to use.
    4. This is because of complaints from people who overwrite their files and then want them back. It's makes it harder to destroy your original work. Send a frown and let Microsoft know you prefer the old way.

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