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The biggest challenge with Excel features remains versioning: functions are tied to a specific Excel releases, and it takes years before enough people run a ver

The biggest challenge with Excel features remains versioning: functions are tied to a specific Excel releases, and it takes years before enough people run a version supporting them. I wish they made these an add-on. Until then, I expect to hear my fancy files are "broken."

omh 5y ago
Quite a lot of organisations are now running Office 365. It gets updated monthly with new features as well as security updates. Even more conservative organisations will often be running Office 365 with a lag, still getting features after ~6 months. If you need 100% compatibility that will always take a while, and I'm sure some big enterprises are on old style office. But it seems like the vast majority of small/medium business is on the Office 365 juggernaut now.
- signal11 5y ago
  True. And a few large organisations are taking those baby steps too. Some of these super-conservative organisations started using subscription software with Adobe’s creative cloud, and got familiar with monthly update schedules thanks to Windows and RHEL patching. They are slowly coming around to accepting that Word and Excel can be deployed and patched just like the OS, and paid for like Photoshop, or used online along with things like Teams and OneDrive inside the organisation.
masklinn 5y ago
> The biggest challenge with Excel features remains versioning: functions are tied to a specific Excel releases, and it takes years before enough people run a version supporting them. Also seems difficult to maintain if these are cell-bound, and both the cell edition interface and the Name Manager interface were an incredibly poor edition experience from what I remember, but maybe that improved since?
- occamrazor 5y ago
  There is a new and better Name Manager in the Mac version.
dudus 5y ago
My Org has Office 365 but the Office installed on our machines are controlled by the Corp. Until recently we had the V2008 release from July 2020, just a month ago we got updated to V2102 from Feb 2021.
avnigo 5y ago
This is really the biggest problem with Excel portability: feature fragmentation. While these new features seem exciting, I don't expect to use them anytime soon if I'm planning on sharing my work with others because it's not that easy tracking down which features are tied to specific Excel releases.
- nojito 5y ago
  O365 alleviates this. I do not send spreadsheets anymore and just send a onedrive view only link to whoever needs to see it. On the chance they need to manipulate I share the edit link (which has version control) and my stress levels are minimal.

omh 5y ago

Quite a lot of organisations are now running Office 365. It gets updated monthly with new features as well as security updates. Even more conservative organisations will often be running Office 365 with a lag, still getting features after ~6 months. If you need 100% compatibility that will always take a while, and I'm sure some big enterprises are on old style office. But it seems like the vast majority of small/medium business is on the Office 365 juggernaut now.

signal11 5y ago
True. And a few large organisations are taking those baby steps too. Some of these super-conservative organisations started using subscription software with Adobe’s creative cloud, and got familiar with monthly update schedules thanks to Windows and RHEL patching. They are slowly coming around to accepting that Word and Excel can be deployed and patched just like the OS, and paid for like Photoshop, or used online along with things like Teams and OneDrive inside the organisation.

masklinn 5y ago

> The biggest challenge with Excel features remains versioning: functions are tied to a specific Excel releases, and it takes years before enough people run a version supporting them. Also seems difficult to maintain if these are cell-bound, and both the cell edition interface and the Name Manager interface were an incredibly poor edition experience from what I remember, but maybe that improved since?

occamrazor 5y ago
There is a new and better Name Manager in the Mac version.

dudus 5y ago

My Org has Office 365 but the Office installed on our machines are controlled by the Corp. Until recently we had the V2008 release from July 2020, just a month ago we got updated to V2102 from Feb 2021.

avnigo 5y ago

This is really the biggest problem with Excel portability: feature fragmentation. While these new features seem exciting, I don't expect to use them anytime soon if I'm planning on sharing my work with others because it's not that easy tracking down which features are tied to specific Excel releases.

nojito 5y ago
O365 alleviates this. I do not send spreadsheets anymore and just send a onedrive view only link to whoever needs to see it. On the chance they need to manipulate I share the edit link (which has version control) and my stress levels are minimal.