Why is Excel 2016 for Mac so bad?

re: CUT AND PASTE

I have the same problem with Excel v. 16 and it's been around for what seems like a long time. The secret is to pause for about 2 seconds after "copy" before you paste, that usually works without the beachball delay. Unfortunately, it shouldn't require this, and when like me you're concentrating on work and getting things done, you may often just copy/cut and paste quickly, as we're accustomed to doing with most Mac applications. 

Word used to have a similar problem with cut and paste, and still does in limited situations, when you paste "too quickly", especially the first cut and paste after you've opened Word. Until a few years ago, cut and pasting too quickly in Word was almost guaranteed to crash it.

Only Office apps seem to have this elementary problem. Most developers have long ago mastered this seemingly simple function. My guess is that Microsoft uses its own code instead of the OS X built in interface tools. (sorry I don't know the technical way to describe some of this). And the reason for that is probably that Office for Mac is a port of the WIndows code for Word and Excel, with the one exception that the drop down menus remain in place. Microsoft kept the menus so that they could describe Office for Mac as "unmistakably Mac", when in fact it's not at all.

As a side comment, the most obvious problem with the ribbon (and with the Office for Mac drop down menus which are separately included in every window instead of appearing in a proper menu bar) is the workflow interruption that results when you don't have the Word or Excel window at full width. This is another Windows interface feature. Some of the ribbon functions and menus disappear and can't be found until you realize what a "mistake" you've made by using slightly narrowed windows. Just another way to interrupt your workflow. 

Thanks so much. That does seem to make a difference but it really shouldn't be necessary with an expensive ubiquitous program like Office 365. btw in response to another comment I switched on Activity Monitor during the minor operation of opening a tiny Excel file and it appears that this occupies more than 100% of the CPU: https://www.dropbox.com/s/8g73ygzy3qqyv2b/Activity%20Monitor%20Opening%20Excel%20File.png?dl=0

Regards

Joe Earle

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.

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.

.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.

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.