Interactive dashboard created in using MS Office 365 enterprise for Windows (using pivot slicers and timelines) doesn’t work on Office 365 for mac

Question

Good afternoon.

Our company has developed a interactive dashboard using MS Office 365 for Windows, using features like power query, data models pivot slicers and timelines. It works perfectly across the various services we have, even if we share it outside of our organization everyone is able to open and interact with the dashboard. However a new board member used Office 365 for mac and the dashboard doesn’t work. The slicers are non-responsive as if they were just images.

Would you be able to help with us with this.

Thank you in advance.

All the best,

Marco Branco

Answer 1

Hi Marco,

When Satya Nadella took over the reigns as Chief Software Engineer from Bill Gates, he had a vision that using a single code base would enable Microsoft Office to run nearly identically across all end points: Windows, Mac, iPhone, iPad, iPod, Android and (at the time) Windows Phone.

During the middle of Office 2016's life, Microsoft made the big switch in code base from Mac code base to the common Office code base. It was when the version numbers went from 15.x to 16.x in the fall of 2018. That change killed off some Mac-only features and brought in many features that previously were Windows-only. It brought the 64-bit version of Microsoft Office to the Mac, something Apple had been pushing for since Mac OS 9 was replaced.

In theory, with the base being the same for Office for Mac and Office for Windows, with a little tweaking here and there Mac users and users of the web versions of Office should automatically get all the latest Office features in Microsoft Office.

Sadly, Satya's vision has failed. Along with it, Office for Mac and Office for the web appear to be over.

This quote from the UserVoice forum "...we’ll be unable to bring PowerPivot to Excel for Mac, because it relies on features of the operating system that don’t exist on Mac OS" means Microsoft has thrown in the towel. They've given up. It seems that every feature that relies heavily on Windows APIs is simply too difficult to bring forward. To me, it appears Office for Mac and Office on line products are officially dead.

PowerPivot, the Data Model, UserForms, Ribbon customizations, 3D maps, Com Add-ins - all of these are core features of Microsoft Office that are now missing or broken in Office for Mac and Office for the Web. Without them, a workbook that ought to work cross-platform simply falls apart, as yours did. You have complete data loss. Complete loss of functionality.

Gong forward, that leaves only the Windows Desktop version of Microsoft Office as a viable office product in the Microsoft sphere.

This means that you and everyone who uses Microsoft Office in an cross-platform environment needs to make choices.

You are lucky that you have an Office 365 subscription because you can run the Windows version of Microsoft Office on your Mac using the same license. Perpetual license holders can't do that.

To run Microsoft Office for Windows on your Mac you will need to purchase a retail copy of Microsoft WIndows and be willing to run and support Windows on your Mac. You can use Apple's all-or-nothing Boot Camp and choose whether to run Mac OS or Microsoft Windows when you boot your Mac. Or, you can use Parallels (another added cost) and run Microsoft Office concurrently with your Mac applications. Microsoft Office runs well in both Boot Camp and Parallels.

What about other Office products? I think the next best thing to Microsoft Office is Libre Office. LibreOffice is better than Microsoft Office at cross-platform compatibility. You can build your documents, workbooks, and presentations on one platform and be pretty darn shure your files will work on Windows and Mac. LibreOffice falls down in that its automation story is pitiful. Its feature set is more than 10 years out of date. Here's what your workbook looks like when opened in LibreOffice:

If you can live without the new stuff, then LibreOffice is a very good alternative to Microsoft Office. It's dated, yes. But it's free and easy to support. It's definately worth looking into. 10 years-ago Office was not that bad.

There are some BI (Business Intelligence) programs that are cross-platform. Tableau is one that comes to mind because it is favored by academics. It's pricey and focuses on the charting aspects of Excel. There's no word processor, a limited and weak presentation component, and no email. Tableau and its competitors are very pricey for what you get IMHO.

Sorry to have to deliver what I consider to be bad news.

Answer 2

Jim:

I had to take a round about route to download the file. Using File > Save As showed me a message that it would strip out features not supported in the browser .  AHH. Not what I want. ("Hey dummy MS, I'm downloading to get full features on desktop ... " )

So then I tried Viewing dropdown > Edit button > Download button (appeared to be disabled, but wasn't).

Marco:

We often have problems downloading from corporate OneDrive or SharePoint. I usually recommend copying the file to a personal OneDrive and sharing from there.  It generally seems to work better.

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After I downloaded it (to Windows 10) and enabled Macros and other security warnings I have not problem using the slicers.

Also ask the user which slicers SPECIFICALLY are not working. 

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The design of the dashboard does not make it clear where the slicers are supposed to apply, which specific charts

How about doing something like this crude example where I've highlighted sections.  

Actually, I know the second highlight area should actually be split into 3 separate highlights.

Some of the slicers are repeated multiple charts, specifically TESTS and MONTHS timelines.  You know you can define a slicer once, and have it modify mutliple Pivot Tables/Charts at the same time ...

apply the same filter to multiple pivot tables?

https://www.extendoffice.com/documents/excel/2352-excel-multiple-pivot-tables-same-filter.html

Sometimes, you may create several pivot tables based on the same data source, and now you filter one pivot table and want other pivot tables are filtered with the same way as well, that means, you want to change multiple pivot table filters at once in Excel. This article, I will talk about the usage of a new feature Slicer in Excel 2010 and 2013.

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**Change All Pivot Charts With One Filter**                 2012 12 13

https://contexturesblog.com/archives/2012/12/13/change-all-pivot-charts-with-one-filter/

Slicers were introduced in Excel 2010, and they make it easy to change multiple pivot tables with a single click. In earlier versions, you can use programming to change the report filters in multiples...

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Change the filter at the top of the sheet, and all the connected pivot charts change. This technique from AlexJ uses Excel 2010 slicers, and no programming. 

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For example, you could put the slicers at the top or side of the display using the View tab > Window group > Freeze Panes drop down.  Or you could use the techniques in the following tips to "float" the slicers.

Floating- **Macro to Move a Pivot Table Slicer****** 2011 05 04****http://blog.contextures.com/archives/2011/05/04/keep-excel-slicers-from-sliding/

Recently, we saw how you can use Excel Slicers, to filter fields in one or more pivot tables. This week, we’ll use a macro to move a pivot table slicer. In the comments of...

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keep slicer of Pivot Table moving with worksheet scrolling in Excel?(VBA) ****https://www.extendoffice.com/documents/excel/4381-excel-slicer-move-with-scroll.html

While working with Pivot Table, you may insert slicers to filter data visually of the table. This article is talking about keeping slicer of Pivot Table always visible while scrolling the worksheet.

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The top slicers are working, but some of the others are acting like you describe. ie

In the "second section", I can change slicer selection, but no apparent change in a chart. Actually, no values displayed in the chart  Can you make them work? Is there something special I have to do?

Answer 3

Dear Marco,

Thanks for providing the file here. As the SharePoint link you provided contains the tenant domain, I removed the tenant domain to protect your privacy.

I do a test with the provided file and do a test with the Excel for Mac application 16.44, 16.45 and 16.46 and I can reproduce the issue on Mac. It seems that the macro in the file works in the Excel for Windows application and doesn't work in the Excel for Mac application. When I run the macro in the Excel for Mac application, there is error message popping up.

As the issue may be to some extent related to the macro in the file and our forum has a specific Programming category coping with Excel macro related issues and questions, I'll move the thread to the Excel Programming category for you to get expert help and hope someone there can look into the macro and edit the code for it to run fine in the file in the Excel for Mac application.

Thanks for your understanding and have a nice day!

Cliff

[Edited by Cliff MSFT at 5:36 AM on Thursday, January 21, 2021]

Answer 4

Good morning.

The problem with the slicers is not in windows 10 its in the mac version of office.

Thanks for looking at the rest of the file but it was purely to look at the slicers in a mac environment. The content doesnt work as supposed because i had to remove a lot of personal data from the file hence the discrepancies.

Thanks for trying to help though.

All the best,

Marco

Answer 5

Good morning Cliff.

Would you be able to try something. I have removed all macros from the file shared in the public link. Could you try to run it on the mac environment. That should tell us beyond any doubt if it is an issue with the macros or not.

Thank you,

Marco