(Moderators: I know this is OT, but we don't have many opportunities to give feedback to the Excel Developers. Please consider creating allowing this just for today.)
Hello! Today there's a Q&A with the Excel developers in Reddit (Friday, April 4 at 1:00pm PDT/4:00pm EDT on reddit). We don't usually have a chance to give feedback since the Microsoft Connect initiative doesn't contemplate Office, and they won't even take bug reports from users; their attention is mostly on the big corporate users and no the analysts. So I though we should try to coordinate some questions about the worst parts of Excel. Here's what I think are the things that need the most attention, presented as questions for the Excel Dev team:
1. When will you update the 20 years old VBA Editor to something more modern? The need for VBA won’t go again even if you ignore it!
2. Do you plan to improve the scripting tools, adding things like modern .net operators, string and table methods, etc? Apps for Office, VSTO and ExcelDNA all address different needs than those of the vast VBA community, which is mostly comprised of analysts scripting solving for special cases, or SMBs in which the switch to another technology wouldn’t make sense cost-wise (and who you won’t hear given the lack ways of providing feedback for Excel). We can't use "Apps for Office" for the kind of problems we solve here! Proprietary coding for multiple users in a large enterprise = bad, proprietary coding for analysis = GREAT!
3. When will you begin accepting bug reports and feature requests from the whole Excel community? There’s no way to provide feedback for the Excel/Office team unless you’re a big MSFT partner; Excel/Office is one of the products without presence in Microsoft Connect. There’s little software that won’t take feedback from its community, and Excel’s is large!
4. Will you add new worksheet functions? Even if Excel is the superior product, there are a lot of community UDFs and functions introduced by Google Spreadsheets that are great additions. For instance, see some of the formulas that Google has and we're missing out: the REGEXEXTRACT, REGEX*, SPLIT... text formulas, the filter formulas (UNIQUE, SORT….), the XPath scrapping functions (IMPORTHTML), the data sources functions (IMPORTDATA...). Will we get CONCATENATE(range)?
5. When will you improve Excel’s charting abilities for analysts and fix the old, old bugs that have yet to get attention? They are lacking, often requiring a lot of manual “hacking” to achieve results; look at the amount of MVPs that dedicate themselves at explaining such hacks in their blogs. The Excel community has documented over the years TONS of bugs and shortcomings of Excel charting but instead of addressing those you only take care of the big partners requests which are biased towards only a part of the user base.There’s a lot of stuff that comes to mind: LINE CHART GAPS FOR ERRORS OR “”!!!, cycle plots, dynamic data ranges, pattern fills, labelling that stays in its place even if you change the data range, fixing the many problems with date category axis, the inability to accurately select a specific point in a time series where many are drawn, such as a daily series spanning years; the impossibility of easily applying filters to charts such as displaying a level series as a % change over a year ago; the incredible difficulty of highlighting specific time spans in charts; candle charts; the manual labour required to display chart labels to the right of the last observation of a series with the proper formatting; the difficulty in going from a series to the source data range.... etc etc.
I hope you agree that this is an opportunity we shouldn't pass. Thanks!
Hello! Today there's a Q&A with the Excel developers in Reddit (Friday, April 4 at 1:00pm PDT/4:00pm EDT on reddit). We don't usually have a chance to give feedback since the Microsoft Connect initiative doesn't contemplate Office, and they won't even take bug reports from users; their attention is mostly on the big corporate users and no the analysts. So I though we should try to coordinate some questions about the worst parts of Excel. Here's what I think are the things that need the most attention, presented as questions for the Excel Dev team:
1. When will you update the 20 years old VBA Editor to something more modern? The need for VBA won’t go again even if you ignore it!
2. Do you plan to improve the scripting tools, adding things like modern .net operators, string and table methods, etc? Apps for Office, VSTO and ExcelDNA all address different needs than those of the vast VBA community, which is mostly comprised of analysts scripting solving for special cases, or SMBs in which the switch to another technology wouldn’t make sense cost-wise (and who you won’t hear given the lack ways of providing feedback for Excel). We can't use "Apps for Office" for the kind of problems we solve here! Proprietary coding for multiple users in a large enterprise = bad, proprietary coding for analysis = GREAT!
3. When will you begin accepting bug reports and feature requests from the whole Excel community? There’s no way to provide feedback for the Excel/Office team unless you’re a big MSFT partner; Excel/Office is one of the products without presence in Microsoft Connect. There’s little software that won’t take feedback from its community, and Excel’s is large!
4. Will you add new worksheet functions? Even if Excel is the superior product, there are a lot of community UDFs and functions introduced by Google Spreadsheets that are great additions. For instance, see some of the formulas that Google has and we're missing out: the REGEXEXTRACT, REGEX*, SPLIT... text formulas, the filter formulas (UNIQUE, SORT….), the XPath scrapping functions (IMPORTHTML), the data sources functions (IMPORTDATA...). Will we get CONCATENATE(range)?
5. When will you improve Excel’s charting abilities for analysts and fix the old, old bugs that have yet to get attention? They are lacking, often requiring a lot of manual “hacking” to achieve results; look at the amount of MVPs that dedicate themselves at explaining such hacks in their blogs. The Excel community has documented over the years TONS of bugs and shortcomings of Excel charting but instead of addressing those you only take care of the big partners requests which are biased towards only a part of the user base.There’s a lot of stuff that comes to mind: LINE CHART GAPS FOR ERRORS OR “”!!!, cycle plots, dynamic data ranges, pattern fills, labelling that stays in its place even if you change the data range, fixing the many problems with date category axis, the inability to accurately select a specific point in a time series where many are drawn, such as a daily series spanning years; the impossibility of easily applying filters to charts such as displaying a level series as a % change over a year ago; the incredible difficulty of highlighting specific time spans in charts; candle charts; the manual labour required to display chart labels to the right of the last observation of a series with the proper formatting; the difficulty in going from a series to the source data range.... etc etc.
I hope you agree that this is an opportunity we shouldn't pass. Thanks!
