Help Make Excel Better

October 12, 2022 - by Bill Jelen

Problem: I have a few ideas about how I’d like Excel to operate differently. Other people must be having similar problems. How can I communicate my ideas to Microsoft?

Strategy: Post your idea to Excel.UserVoice.com and garner 20 votes. The circa-2016 version of the Excel team is very eager to engage with customers. Now that they can push features to Office 365 monthly, they are actively reading all ideas posted to Excel.UserVoice.Com. They will respond to any idea with 20 or more votes.

By the way, each person gets 10 votes and can vote up to three times for the same idea. So - bring some Krispy Kreme doughnuts to the accounting department and you only need to coerce six co-workers to vote three times for you idea!

Here is my success story: I’ve been lobbying the Excel team to allow me to have all future pivot tables start in Tabular layout instead of Compact layout. I asked every year from 2007 forward. When I asked again in November 2015, the project manager from the Excel team challenged me to get 20 votes at Excel.UserVoice.com. I came back the next day with 20 votes, and two days later with 100 votes, and eventually (by talking up the idea at YouTube - http://mrx.cl/watchpodcast1959), with 500+ votes. In less than a year, they had started my idea and shipped it in Office 365.

An idea posted at Excel.UserVoice.com asking for pivot table defaults has 560 votes. Ash from the Excel team announced the feature is complete. — Figure 744. If a feature is rankling you, it might be rankling a lot of other people, too!

This article is an excerpt from Power Excel With MrExcel

Title photo by AbsolutVision on Unsplash