What Works As Excel Mac Feel More

A ready-for- Retina-screens ribbon makes Excel 2016 for Mac feel more like the Windows version, while retaining a Mac distinctiveness.

This comes at the price of the traditional formattingstandard toolbars disappearing although Excel 2016 for Mac retains the traditional main menu by which many of its functions can be accessed.

The pinch-expand gesture is now supported, for example, so you can zoom in and out of larger spreadsheets easily using a trackpad.

Keyboard shortcuts used in the Windows version of Excel are now supported, which will aid PC switchers.

The cell highlight now slickly glides between cells but once the coolness factor wears off it becomes annoying.

When combined with a new smooth scrolling experience within spreadsheets, accurately selecting a cell, row or column can be insanity inducing - and especially with the aforementioned trackpad.

This sounds like a minor grumble but has a massive impact on usability.

The addition of PivotTable S licers vastly improves the pivot chart abilities, allowing you to dig further into data with just one click, and a new Analysis Toolpak add-in, accessible from the Tools Add-Ins menu, will delight engineers and statisticians (and leave the rest of us scratching our heads - heres more information if you want it).

For trivial calculations such as most of us undertake everyday - household budgets, for example - Excel 2016s performance feels no different to that of the earlier 2011 release.

Yet there are many unhappy individuals who find the newer version interminably slow with even moderately complex spreadsheets.

To make things worse, all the main Office 2016 for Mac apps are 32-bit, rather than 64-bit, which fundamentally limits Excels number-crunching performance.

Windows users get to choose between 32- and 64-bit versions of the Office suite.).

The VBA editor in Excel 2016 for Mac has been rebuilt from scratch and lost nearly everything in the process, reduced to little more than a bare editing window.

Obviously, if the Mac is your primary platform then this is unacceptable.

The good news in that Microsoft has begun work to port the old editor from Office 2011.

For example, in version 15.18 of Excel 2016, which we looked at and which was the current release at the time of writing, Excel 2016 had gained a selection pane by which you can better organise drawing objects (to view it, select an object, then click Selection Pane on the Shape Format ribbon).

Thats a big feature to add eight months after the app was first released but, hey, lets be grateful.

They request basic functionality, much of which was already present in the older Excel 2011.

At what point will Microsoft abandon the fundamentally unfinished Excel 2016 and turn its attention to the next release.

This is worthwhile because the impetus seems to be to finally - after years of Excel for Mac being the underdog - of feature-matching the Windows release of Excel.

This version of Excel gets a number of formulas once limited to Windows Excel, for example, which enhances spreadsheet compatibility.

Unlike the other components of Office 2016 for Mac, which are largely solid, at the present time Excel is barely out of the gate.

What Works As Excel Install And Run

You can install and run Office 2011 alongside the Office 2016 without any issues, and Office 2011 comes as an option with an Office 365 subscription.

The new LG Wing is turning heads with its revolving screen design.

What Works As Excel For Mac