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derFunkenstein
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Excel for Mac is not great, but not as bad as i made it soun

Tue Apr 19, 2016 4:37 pm

Excel 2016 on the Mac is just...let's put it this way: if you think using Excel on a PC is horrifying, you'll actually run screaming back to the PC after using it on a Mac.

I'm using it on a desktop where the only input devices are a keyboard and a mouse. No "Magic trackpad" or whatever. So the first sin Excel on the Mac commits is that it hides scrollbars regardless of the system setting to hide scroll bars either on/off or based on input device type. So you can't just grab the scroll bar and start scrolling. And worse, you can't really scroll with the mouse unless you want to scroll many lines at once. Crank on the wheel and you can scroll. Roll it a few clicks and the grid just kind of bounces up and down, snapping back to its original position. The good news is if you start cranking the wheel the scroll bars appear and you can drag them to where you want to be. Kind of.

It's great that Microsoft tries to do something useful on other platforms, but this is just...not useful. Fortunately I only signed up for a free month of Office 365 for the privilege. I'll stick to the PC version.

edit: biffzinker pointed out that, as it turns out, I wasn't running hte latest version that I thought I was.
Last edited by derFunkenstein on Tue Apr 19, 2016 5:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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biffzinker
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Re: Excel for Mac is just the worst version of Excel known t

Tue Apr 19, 2016 4:59 pm

Version 15.15 of Excel, which I just installed, appears to fix the scroll-bar issue (scroll bars not staying on when they are supposed to).

Excel 2016 scroll bars won't stay on
Does this by any chance provide help to issue you've encountered derFunkenstein?
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DancinJack
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Re: Excel for Mac is just the worst version of Excel known t

Tue Apr 19, 2016 5:22 pm

I don't have these issues Funk. I think yer doin it wrong :/
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derFunkenstein
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Re: Excel for Mac is just the worst version of Excel known t

Tue Apr 19, 2016 5:31 pm

THis is so weird. I'm running Excel 15.13.3 and it says there are no updates. It never occurred to me that the auto-update checker would lie to me.

edit: Figured it out, thanks to just the suggestion that I was out of date despite what the auto-update tool told me. The auto-update tool itself was way out of date (maybe leftover from the Office 2011 install I removed). Downloading that and installing it led to another auto-update update (whew). That, in turn, gave me not just one but THREE Office updates that the older auto-update tool had.

So I guess my rage was directed at the wrong Microsoft software. Instead of the culprit being Excel, the problem was somewhere between the Office 2016 update process and the auto-update tool that couldn't update itself.

Would you guys believe that I've had my rage bottled within myself since September? I could have bitched sooner and had fixes.
Last edited by derFunkenstein on Tue Apr 19, 2016 5:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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biffzinker
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Re: Excel for Mac is just the worst version of Excel known t

Tue Apr 19, 2016 5:35 pm

So my post was helpful? :)
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derFunkenstein
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Re: Excel for Mac is just the worst version of Excel known t

Tue Apr 19, 2016 5:36 pm

Yes, thanks to biffzinker. :D See my edit.
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biffzinker
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Re: Excel for Mac is just the worst version of Excel known t

Tue Apr 19, 2016 5:40 pm

All I did was search DuckDuckgo for "hidden scroll bars Microsoft Excel 2016." Anyways glad to hear you figured out the problem.
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derFunkenstein
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Re: Excel for Mac is not great, but not as bad as i made it

Tue Apr 19, 2016 5:42 pm

I'd much rather just complain.
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biffzinker
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Re: Excel for Mac is not great, but not as bad as i made it

Tue Apr 19, 2016 5:43 pm

Well complaining only gets you so far without any resolution. :P
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localhostrulez
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Re: Excel for Mac is not great, but not as bad as i made it

Tue Apr 19, 2016 7:24 pm

Gotta love how Office for Mac *STILL* (last I checked) does zoom based on 72dpi (which Macs used a long, long, long time ago) instead of 96dpi. Which means that on the same screen, Office for Mac renders the document 72/96=75% as big as Office for Windows does. And Excel won't let you change this default.

Meanwhile, all the competition that runs on Macs got this right long ago... I actually use LO for quick scratchpad stuff when I'm on the Mac, for this very reason.
 
bthylafh
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Re: Excel for Mac is not great, but not as bad as i made it

Tue Apr 19, 2016 7:53 pm

Office for Mac 2016's auto-updater is an abomination. It will:

1) only pull in updates for the Office apps you have used (so if you've only used Excel and not Word, you only get Excel updates)
2) pull from what appears to be the very slowest server Microsoft owns - it seemed like it took an hour to get the updates, because
3) the updates are frickin' huge. 500-600 megs per program, per update unless that's changed recently.

I'd be cheesed if I were a Mac weenie that needed Office. As it is, I just have to support them.
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derFunkenstein
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Re: Excel for Mac is not great, but not as bad as i made it

Tue Apr 19, 2016 8:30 pm

It downloaded around 2GB but I was way out of date. Maybe now it's better, but I am not a valid example.
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anotherengineer
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Re: Excel for Mac is not great, but not as bad as i made it

Tue Apr 19, 2016 9:30 pm

Excel 2003 Professional FTW!!!
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Captain Ned
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Re: Excel for Mac is not great, but not as bad as i made it

Tue Apr 19, 2016 9:38 pm

I miss Office 97.
What we have today is way too much pluribus and not enough unum.
 
the
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Re: Excel for Mac is not great, but not as bad as i made it

Tue Apr 19, 2016 11:49 pm

Best version of Office remains 3.0 for Mac in my eye. It is approaching 25 years old. That goes to show how long Office has been regressing...
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localhostrulez
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Re: Excel for Mac is not great, but not as bad as i made it

Tue Apr 19, 2016 11:59 pm

You know there's nothing important missing when you can use the old product, and by itself, nothing seems particularly lacking. Like an early 00's car or Office 97 - I know newer ones exist, but it doesn't come to mind if no one mentions it...

Edit: Actually, mom is still on Word 07. And I can't imagine she wants to shell out more money for '16 or 365 (07's doing the job just fine, and all they added was annoying cloud integration by default), so I probably won't change it.
 
Topinio
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Re: Excel for Mac is not great, but not as bad as i made it

Wed Apr 20, 2016 6:36 am

Ah, Excel for Mac, bringing serialization to 2016, so large workbooks are far less usable on the native OS than in a Windows VM.

localhostrulez wrote:
You know there's nothing important missing when you can use the old product, and by itself, nothing seems particularly lacking. Like an early 00's car or Office 97 - I know newer ones exist, but it doesn't come to mind if no one mentions it...

Edit: Actually, mom is still on Word 07. And I can't imagine she wants to shell out more money for '16 or 365 (07's doing the job just fine, and all they added was annoying cloud integration by default), so I probably won't change it.

Not sure the first part holds, not knowing better doesn't mean better isn't out there, and personally I'd much rather if I was in an accident it be in a 2016 car than a 1997 one ...

On the second point, sure, Office 2007 is fine -- at least until it goes out of support in 18 months, at the same time as Office for Mac 2011 -- but Microsoft has already pushed its Mac customers to shell out for an upgrade by ending support for the equivalent release, Office 2008 for Mac, 3 years ago :evil:
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localhostrulez
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Re: Excel for Mac is not great, but not as bad as i made it

Thu Apr 21, 2016 1:29 am

Eh, depends - true, newer cars are better for safety. But a car from the 90's isn't exactly a model T - it fundamentally isn't that different from a new one under the hood, it'll hit the freeway at 70-80MPH nearly as well as a new one, it's perfectly reliable if maintained decently, the controls (save for fancy stereos and AC being more complicated) are the same, etc. When I drive my Civic (2005/generation ran 2001-2005), I don't exactly find myself wishing I had more gadgets in the car, or an obnoxious/smart HVAC system (I loathe those; my old simple one is rather nice and doesn't glitch like my dad's new VW one). Actually, the extras on the new ones are more of a "I can tolerate this" than a "I want this" thing.

Same goes for Office 2007 - off the top of my head, they gave Outlook a ribbon in 2010 (but she doesn't use Outlook), 2010 introduced some new wordart features (that I promptly forgot about when the novelty wore off), and 2013 introduced cloud obnoxiousness, a really annoying cursor effect, and a blinding white color scheme. Nothing that we care about (shoot, I get 365 free through my school, but I ignored it and kept my less-obnoxious copy of 2010 for the few times LO can't handle something). Yes, it won't have any security updates, but I'm more concerned about updating a web browser or OS, quite honestly (what about the loads of older unsupported software out there, whether adobe CS or a proprietary corporate app?). And Microsoft wants us to pay $100/year for that? :roll:

To put it another way - it's a tool to do a job, and that job has not changed *at all* (she's writing reports for work), not one bit, since we bought that copy of Office. It's a piece of software, not a physical thing, and the file format hasn't changed either, so it isn't exactly falling apart. People on budgets tend to not replace old cars if they're still running well, after all.
 
Buub
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Re: Excel for Mac is not great, but not as bad as i made it

Thu Apr 21, 2016 5:05 pm

Apple Numbers (and Pages, and especially Keynote) is looking better every day...
 
derFunkenstein
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Re: Excel for Mac is not great, but not as bad as i made it

Thu Apr 21, 2016 9:12 pm

Buub wrote:
Apple Numbers (and Pages, and especially Keynote) is looking better every day...

Numbers would be awesome if I was sending docs to people that use Macs.

I was on-site with a customer today who was using Excel 2003, which was quite a blast from the past. :lol:
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