Excel Data Types Not Working

Question

Updated 12/19/2022

Data Types are currently not working as expected for all users of Microsoft Excel. The work-around I recommend is to revert to version 16.64.

If you are affected and haven't already done so, please take a moment to notify Microsoft that you are affected by this problem. The way to do it is to use the Menu Bar and choose Help > Feedback > I Don't Like Something. Microsoft uses the Squeaky Wheel method to prioritize bug fixes. The more reports, the higher up the priority list the bug gets. Please do this from the current update of Excel before reverting to 16.64.

To revert to version 16.64:

Use the Menu Bar and choose Help > Check for Updates to launch AutoUpdate

In AutoUpdate, set updates to Manual to prevent AutoUpdate from automatically updating after you revert to the older build.

In Finder, navigate to the Applications folder

Right-click on Microsoft Excel.app and choose Move to Trash

Restart your Mac

Empty the Mac OS Trash

Use this installer to install build 16.64 of Microsoft Excel: Excel

Some users may be able to find a work-around, which is why I am posting this discussion. Some users will be blocked from this due to licensing or IT department restrictions.

There are third-party solutions available. I don't know which ones are great and which ones are less good. I'm hoping people will try them out and reply here with their results and recommendations.

On the Insert tab of the Ribbon choose Add-ins > Get Add-ins.

In the resulting dialog enter the word Stock in the Search field then click the spyglass icon. There are a lot of add-ins available. Let's chat about them in this thread.

Answer 1

Sounds like an awful experience.

Can you share this thread with your Tier 3 support person? Or share your Tier 3 support person with me? We've all been documenting the failure modes here, and through the in-app Feedback mechanism (don't really know where that feedback actually goes and if anyone looks/acts on it).

Answer 2

Sounds like an awful experience.

Can you share this thread with your Tier 3 support person? Or share your Tier 3 support person with me? We've all been documenting the failure modes here, and through the in-app Feedback mechanism (don't really know where that feedback actually goes and if anyone looks/acts on it).

I did share this thread, but the only contact I have is sending email with the old case number. So far no response. I may need to open a new case.

Answer 3

I also have this problem. Just paid for Office 365 yesterday solely for this feature. Seems like you can't even get what you want when you pay. I don't understand how this feature is not fixed when similar problems have been reported for several months now.

Answer 4

I complained to Microsoft sales, who apparently escalated it as my request was to defer my automatic renewal until this issue is resolved. They told me 48 hours. It's been 96 hours and I haven't heard from anyone.

This Excel issue is by far the biggest issue for Mac Excel users, at least judging by this forum:

I did hear back from some of my in-app feedback submissions, but it is frankly a BS canned response. Honestly if a human clicked a button to respond with this, they should be fired because their job is useless. And if a machine just responded, I'm flabbergasted as to why it took so long for the machine to send such a useless canned response:

From: Microsoft Customer Feedback <feedbk@microsoft.com>Mon 2023-01-09 10:00

Thanks for the feedback about Excel for Mac.  We noticed that you haven't installed an update to Excel for a while. Your feedback is important to us, but we tend to focus on comments we receive about more recent versions, since issues with older versions may have already been addressed. 

We recommend that you upgrade to the latest version. Normally, you can do this by going to the Help menu and choosing Check for Updates.  If you installed from the Mac App Store, then you can use the App Store to install an available update. 

If you're not being offered an update when you go to the Help menu and check for updates, you can do the following:

1. Download the latest version of Microsoft AutoUpdate.
2. Install Microsoft AutoUpdate.
3. Go to the Help menu in Excel and check for updates.
4. Install the latest updates.

Once you install the latest update, please send feedback to let us know if your issue has been resolved or if you're still having trouble.

For your reference, you submitted the following feedback on December 24, 2022: Data types are still not working on Excel 16.68 for Mac OS X. Please read the community forums about this issue. It has all the intel you need: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/excel-data-types-not-working/5a8d788a-974f-4adf-8563-50d259d9d32c?tm=1668358372179

Many Thanks,
The Excel Team
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Microsoft Corporation, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052 USA

Answer 5

Hi ParadajzNAS,

I read just about every question posted to the Excel for Mac forum and agree with your assessment that failure of Data Types is currently the #1 issue.

My personal observation is that corporate America does not understand the relationship between customer support and revenue. Accountants and boards of directors take the brain-dead position that employee costs and support costs are things to be minimized and by so doing, they increase profits.

It's not just Microsoft. I see many companies have gone down the cost-cutting rabbit hole only to watch them go belly up as a result. It's as if they are using Excel what-If analysis without thinking about the scenario consequences. Maybe to get a degree in management a portion of the data analysis classes should be devoted to why the customer matters more than your spreadsheet.

Another observation I have is that when it comes to technical support for products, with today's tight labor market, anyone who has enough brains and skill works somewhere other than technical support. That leads us to the nonsense reply you received. First they tell you to update to the latest build, which is the problem and not the solution. Then they refer you to this very thread which tells you to revert to build 16.64. It's a schizophrenic reply. It's also a boiler plate reply worthy of an AI robot. I would hope that a real person did not concoct such a self-conflicting reply. Yet daily, I delete more than half the replies made by Microsoft Agents and Advisors here in the forum because they are nonsense, irrelevant, or sometimes even destructive to the user. Last week one of these AI (or maybe not) dolts recommended erasing the entire drive to get rid of unwanted temporary files.

Now to focus on the issue of this thread. I am pretty sure that at some level the Microsoft support staff is aware of the data types issue in Excel for Mac. In the numbers game, the number of Excel Mac users is small vs Excel Windows. What we think of as a large number for Mac is likely a relatively small number for problems on Excel for Windows. Microsoft Support just hasn't gotten this issue raised high enough to the Excel team, or the team itself is focused on something else right now.

Today I did what I could to bring some attention to this thread and hope that someone from the Microsoft Excel team will soon respond here in the forum.