Why is Excel 2016 for Mac so bad?

It's a terrible sham and scam of a product. 

I'm fully up to date on all apps and I even have three Office Business Essentials accounts. 

You can't use third party add-ins on Excel. Plenty of buggy mouse and font problems on Excel too. Try to write auto text headers and footers on Excel, that's a lot of fun, not. Word also has a whole host of problems. Outlook is limited when compared with the PC version. 

How can you sell something for over one hundred pounds sterling that is so utterly crap?

Hi Remon,

I would like to resist closing this thread.

The reason being we are now almost twelve months down the line, all of us with the very latest Mac version of the software, and it is STILL so very very bad. 

There is clearly no resolution and the fact that this thread "Why is Excel 2016 for Mac so bad?" is still highly relevant nearly twelve months later is a sad indictment of Microsoft's commitment to the Mac platform.

I would therefore like to keep the thread open and as publicly available as possible. 

Hopefully Mac people will read this thread before making a purchase. 

Many thanks,

The Mactrician.

Well, I love the conspiracy theories you have postulated. I suspect the problems are the result of much more mundane realities. What follows is my own private conjecture about the situation.

MVPs get to meet the Microsoft Office for Mac team occasionally, along with the Office for Windows teams. Size matters. There are thousands of Office for Windows employees and a relative handful of Office for Mac employees. I think the #1 core problem is there simply aren't enough programmers and program managers at Microsoft who know how to write code for Macs. The door is always open. They ask us to encourage anyone who wants to work for the Office for Mac team to apply to Microsoft. There is a world-wide shortage of programmers in general, and there's a critical shortage of programmers who know how to program on the Mac. Finding and keeping (especially keeping) programmers and good managers seems to me to be the #1 problem.

Then there's the general opinion that the web and mobile devices rule and the desktop is dead. No one wants to program for desktop applications any more. iOS and Android is where the action is. You would think Windows Phone would be attractive to developers who know Windows, but not so much.

Email is considered a dinosaur. Who wants to have on their resume they helped write Microsoft Outlook? Sure, it's used by millions of people every day, but text messages are the rule today.

I can't rank #2 #3 #4, etc. There are just some other factors that seem to come into play.

* Mac OS. It changes like the wind. Trying to keep Office running on each and every update that comes down the pike is a huge problem. Sometimes I think Apple deliberately messes with Mac OS to screw Microsoft. For example, the next item in my list...

* Sandboxing. Microsoft adopted sandboxing to keep Office for Mac "Mac-like" and because Apple won't let Microsoft sell Microsoft Office in the App store unless Microsoft goes along with Sandboxing. Sandboxing crippled Microsoft Office. If I were looking for criminal behavior of a monopolist, I'd be going after Apple about sandboxing and their strong-arm tactics about getting apps into the App store.

* Cost containment. In a sense, maintaining Office for Mac and Office for Windows is duplication. You have to invent everything twice. Since Office for Mac sales are less than Office for Windows, Microsoft is keen on keeping the cost as low as possible. This, combined with not enough staff, is a big problem. Expensive to make features that don't get a lot of use are left out of Office for Mac. For example, Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) is very limited on the Mac. 

Which results in a very weak version of Excel for Mac. I consider it to be only about 1/3 done. If and when the promised Visual Basic Editor ever comes along, then I'll consider it to be 2/3 of the way. When the missing SQL and data components finally make their way to the Mac, then I'll say it's complete.

What is the current version of Office 2016 / Excel 2016 you are running ? Try installing all the updates and check the status.

To the best of my knowledge, all of the features that are in Excel 2016 do work. The problem I find is that not all of the features of Excel for Windows are in Excel 2016 for Mac.

In my humble opinion, you cannot seriously be a Mac-user, are you? All features that are in Excel 2016 work? That might be true in a literal sense, but HOW they work, HOW LONG they need to do their job and if their results are reproducible (now talking about Word) seems COMPLETELY random and far off from being mature!

I do agree with the previous posters that this product is NOWHERE close to being worth the money they ask for it! We pay it, because we HAVE TO, because we simply cannot use any of the great, functioning softwares that in fact are out there, just because MS Office still (and probably will be for ever) a de facto standard, bad as it may be. 

I also deeply disagree with your judgment that "the problem [...] is that not all of the features of Excel for Windows are in Excel 2016 for Mac". Please, please, please, Microsoft, do not even try to put more features into the poor Mac Office suite, before you have not figured out how to write decent software for this platform! Office already has too many features, that I feel MS developers simply have lost control over (not even on Windows")!