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Hey, I work on Excel at Microsoft and wanted to say: if anyone here has any feature requests they want escalated - write them here and I will bring them up. P.

by inglor 4y ago

Hey, I work on Excel at Microsoft and wanted to say: if anyone here has any feature requests they want escalated - write them here and I will bring them up. P.S we actually do read all the feedback people leave in the feedback box - it goes mostly straight to the devs.

lolive 4y ago
I really wonder what Excel developpers think of connecting spreadsheets and master data management services so you can link data between a spreadsheet and the master data. [wasn’t it the goal of OData?]
rad_gruchalski 4y ago
Lambdas are awesome but the ui and their management could use some work. It would be great to have a “script” view to manage defined names instead of hacking them one by one. Single line entry isn’t efficient and the default assumption that cursor keys navigate a sheet instead of the formula box, is annoying. I find myself copying formulas out of excel, modifying them in a text editor, and pasting them back.
- shiftspace-- 4y ago
  Related project: https://aka.ms/get-afe https://aka.ms/get-afe
  - nhinck2 4y ago
    And shift space being the most annoying of all. Being in a formula writing a closing brace only to have the formula bar explode because I didn't let go of shift in time. Who wants that?
djbebs 4y ago
Wait really? Well if thats the case, making VLookups be able to use any column as an input or output, rather than being limited to having the input on the left and the output on the right. Ideally I'd be able to have 2 additional parameters, one that would indicate the column where the input value is to be found, and another that would indicated the column from which the output value would come from. I know there are some work arounds, but this would really simplify my life!
- djbebs 4y ago
  Well half that is already done(the output!)
- shiftspace-- 4y ago
  Might be what you’re after: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/xlookup-function-b7fd680e-6d10-43e6-84f9-88eae8bf5929 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/xlookup-function-...
- Cogito 4y ago
  You may already know this, but if not and for others: my Excel files became a lot more manageable, maintainable, and readable when I switched from _LOOKUP() functions to the INDEX-MATCH pattern, and in particular using the pattern with Tables. Basically - Put the data to be looked up in a named Excel Table with a short, meaningful name. `data` is a good default name, but something with more meaning is better. - Put the lookup 'results' in an Excel Table (naming optional but recommended). The output will be one column of the table, with one of the other columns used as input. - Construct the output formula like `=INDEX(data[[value_column]], MATCH([@[input_column]], data[[lookup_column]], 0))`. - (Optional) Put all formulas at the far right of the results table, so that you can copy new data into the left side easily without overwriting the formulas. The MATCH finds the first row in `data` that has the lookup value from `input_column` (in the current table) in the `lookup_column` (in the data table). The INDEX grabs the value from `value_column` of the `data` table in that row. Using Excel Tables helps by making the formulas more readable, and resistant to change. If new columns are added or removed the formulas continue to work (not true for how most _LOOKUP formulas are written), and the formula gets copied down to new rows as you add them. You can switch to row lookups if needed (though you can't really use Excel Tables anymore) if you need dynamic lookups you can specify both row and column as MATCHes in the INDEX formula (and INDEX against the whole `data` table instead of just one column). Something like `=INDEX(data, MATCH([@[input_column]], data[[lookup_column]], 0), MATCH([@[column_name]], data[#Headers], 0))`.
  - rr888 4y ago
    I was going to reply with this too. Joel Spolsky explains it well https://youtu.be/0nbkaYsR94c?t=1824 https://youtu.be/0nbkaYsR94c?t=1824
jklinger410 4y ago
Please bring back CTRL+SHIFT+V as paste values only
- aargh_aargh 4y ago
  Ctrl-Shift-S? What did it ever do to hurt anyone that it had to go?
- alach11 4y ago
  The solution for this (in most MS Office products) is CTRL+V then CTRL then T. Annoying, I know.
- ies7 4y ago
  I still use the old excel way: Alt+E, A, V
- benhurmarcel 4y ago
  https://stevemiller.net/puretext/ https://stevemiller.net/puretext/
aargh_aargh 4y ago
Bring back Access. I understand it needs to be rebuilt, so probably build it on top of sqlite. There's nothing (popular) in the niche left by Access.
- D13Fd 4y ago
  I love excel, but Access is a nightmare by comparison. It sits in exactly the wrong spot on the power/usability curve. It it's super easy to create a crappy database and hard to make a good one.
zerr 4y ago
Why there is no "Check spelling as you type" in Excel?
rr888 4y ago
Wow great, I used to customize Excel a lot for financial companies. VBA was good enough until about 20 years ago. VSTO was never as good because you need admin rights to install it. ExcelDNA was much better. I gave up 10 years ago so dont know what is going on now tbh. Right now I use Python and Pandas, mostly doing the same stuff but with more rows and a worse experience. If you could find an easy way to combine Python and Excel it would be awesome. Like embedding Python instead of VBA? Would need sandboxing.
- bhewes 4y ago
  We use Xlwings. Xlwings pro allows for embedded python. We use xltrails to version control our excel files with embedded python and/or VBA.
knolan 4y ago
I miss the interactivity of selecting data in older versions of Excel (pre 2007). You can see the data ranges highlighted when you select a series on the plot and you could drag them as desired. Currently it’s very awkward and unintuitive why you can move ydata but not xdata.
ant6n 4y ago
Python support
HHC-Hunter 4y ago
LiamMcCalloway 4y ago
I'm a glass half full kinda of kind, but for excel, the glass is Feb 1st. Please, types would really help. Maybe as a property of named ranges ?
not_a_sw_dork 4y ago
All concerning Excel Online: - Ctrl+F3 to bring up the name manager (unless its already there somehow?) - the full functionality of Conditional formatting, f.e. not all formatting rules can be used Both are requiring me to open files stored on Sharepoint via the desktop app frequently.
Enginerrrd 4y ago
Ok, besides python support... The thing I'd like more than anything: A better way to edit cell with really long function calls. If nothing else, add color coded parenthesis to the bar at the top and not just in the cell. Like, sometimes you just need some if/else statements... but try to parse and edit even something fairly simple like: =IF(AND(LongExpression > 3, Other_longexpression<5),AnotherLongExpression, IF(AND(LongExpression>5,Other_longexpression<10), AnotherLongExpression, 0)) Even with the color-coded parentheses, this is really hard! And God Forbid all those "LongExpression" have a bunch of parenthesis and PEMDAS that needs to be respected. It's... really goddamn tedious. I lost track of the parenthesis while writing that in this window ...However, if I could just have a little popout window where I could add arbitrary new/lines and spaces, that would make a difficult thing into something downright enjoyable and productive. Something like: =IF( AND( LongExpression > 3, Other_longexpression<5 ), AnotherLongExpression, IF( AND( LongExpression>5, Other_longexpression<10 ), AnotherLongExpression, 0 ) ) Would make things much easier to parse.
- collegeburner 4y ago
  +1 for python support. getting vba versions right for stuff that expects to interface through it can be a bitch if some vendor doesn't update stuff. you pay some stupid amount for a financial data product then it's like "lol this doesn't work with your version of office install 2016". not really excel dev's but python would be nice.
- RodgerTheGreat 4y ago
  FYI, the formula bar in Excel is resizable already. Expand the bar (or drag the vertical resize handle at its bottom edge), and then you can use alt+enter to insert a newline.
  - ant6n 4y ago
    It's like coding in an adversarial text window -- the font isn't monospace, there's no syntax highlighting, no auto-indent based on parenthesis, and when you accidentally hit enter (instead of ctrl+enter) you leave the text editor (and then it'll pop up with complaints about your function not being parseable). Also, dragging the size of the edit box bigger means you won't get much of a view of your spreadsheet -- it would probably be nice to attach the edit window on the right (if it was turned into a proper formula editor).
not_a_sw_dork 4y ago
Oh, and: - The name manager is relatively cumbersome to use. F.e. at least some copy/clone functionality would be nice. - Excel table columns cannot be directly used for DVL lists, you need to create additional named ranges pointing to them. - Once Excel tables have been created, afaik it is not yet possible to extend them by additional columns, respective edit their defined ranges? - RegExp support for DVLs, w/o having to rely on VBA (desktop only) or OfficeScript (Online only)
blahedo 4y ago
I regularly use gnumeric for my serious spreadsheet work because Excel can't keep up, and I'm always a little surprised when I have to send a spreadsheet to someone and I find yet another thing that Excel doesn't do; I haven't kept a written list but here's a few off the top of my head (of varying levels of seriousness): - Excel still gets very confused if you have different files with the same filenames in different directories. At one point it would even, if you crashed while editing one `grades.xlsx` file and went to edit a different `grades.xlsx` on restarting, it would restore the new one from the old swap file, silently clobbering data. - Last I checked, Excel can't do a lot of very basic data graphing (histograms are the ones that I've run into most often). - Some versions of Excel (the web one, I think) will just silently not format text that is rotated, making some spreadsheets completely illegible - I got immediately attached to CSE formulas once I discovered them---they do a lot of things I'd always thought I had to build a custom program for---but 90% of the time when I build and debug something in gnumeric with a CSE formula, it works just as I expected based on experience with abstraction and data structures in other languages, but then when I bring it over to Excel to share with other people, one or more of the Excel functions just don't work properly when lifted over arrays. Then I have to go create an explicit area of the sheet (or another sheet) for my intermediate data and copy formulas to make the computation work, ugh. I really want every single function that normally takes non-range arguments and produces a single value to map over a provided range and produce an array when dropped in a CSE formula. (PS to everyone: if you've never crossed paths with "Control-Shift-Enter formulas", look them up and they'll change your life) Good to know about the feedback box, though.
jonemi 4y ago
Why doesn't CTRL+Backspace delete a word when editing a cell?
Enginerrrd 4y ago
Another one: There's something horribly un-optimized going on when I click and drag some values to a new location. Even when there's no overlap, dragging a tiny number of values, like say 3, ends up hanging for several seconds on my very fast computer. I remember this also didn't used to happen back ~2011-2013 ish, and then I remember it started happening at some point and hasn't been fixed since.
abtinf 4y ago
Wishlist: A way to truely, honestly, for the love of god, please, I beg you for mercy, force all pivot tables to fully refresh everything about themselves — their data, caches, retained items, etc. Better pivot table value formatting: use the formatting from the source data set, let me format multiple value columns at once, or apply formatting from value cells to the value columns themselves. Please let me hide everything from a pivot table except for value columns. There are many scenarios where I would like to insert two pivot tables right next to each other, then have a third columns that refers to their cells for a calculation. I don’t need any of the other pivot table options to be available to the user. Dynamic array and lambda functions are not a substitute, because they do not cache results, which causes significant performance problems. A workbook level option to open the workbook in a new process that doesn’t allow interaction with other workbooks. Sometimes, I build computationally intensive standalone workbooks that my users hate to have open, because they degrade performance for all of their other open workbooks. They have to resort to using excel online (or the outlook web preview) to be able to have my workbook open for reference while working on something else. Freeze(x) or Staticize(x): a function that evaluates once and retains its value. I know a similar effect is possible by enabling iterative calculation, but that feels hacky and I don’t know what else is affected by turning iterative calculation on (the fact that it is disabled by default implies significant consequences). In Power Query, a way to append the content of a table to another table, on every Refresh All. This would make it much easier to create snapshots and temporal reports. E.g. I want to know what the value of all sales orders as they were reported each day, verses what I can infer from the database today. I love all the investment in Excel! Are you hiring?
harry8 4y ago
I don't want this to sound snarky but I don't know how to phrase it better. How is the excel team going at fixing the calculation bugs nowadays after wilfully ignoring them for deacdes? Do you have the management buy in to calculate correctly given that's kind of what excel is meant to do? https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1198/tas.2011.09076 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1198/tas.2011.09076 Sometime in the early to mid noughts I recall MS announcing they'd fixed rand() returning a random number between 0 and 1. Someone filled a page with =rand(), set a conditional format, it recalculate a few times and watched many cells turning red showing a negative number. I replicated this at the time. Still? www.gnumeric.org is what I've used when needing a spreadsheet because of those issues and the refusal to fix them. Annoying ui changes happened instead...
Balgair 4y ago
1. Some sort of toggle somewhere for dates before 1900 being supported just like dates after 1900. I work with a lot of historical baseball data with dates before 1900. Constantly having to do string conversions to math and then back again is so tiring. Every time I port in data, I have to clean it up, and every time it screws up in some new and novel way. Yes, I'm aware that XL's date automatic date conversion causes havoc in genetic data sets as is. And yes, I know that it would cause further havoc if pre-1900 dates were automatically seen as dates. But some toggle somewhere that I could just click once and then be done with it would save me weeks of time. 2. Again, another toggle that keeps acutes, tildes, and other letters as separate from their non-marked twins when sorting alphabetically or otherwise processing data. Currently when I sort baseball players by name, alphabetically, the 'á' and 'a' or 'ñ' and 'n' are seen as the same letter and sorted intermixed. This is a huge problem when dealing with Central American, South American, and Caribbean players. Common names like José are not the same as Jose. Same goes for string comprehension functions or searching.
croes 4y ago
Make that Excel auto conversions can be switched off entirely
pillefitz 4y ago
A simple way to connect to the cloud. We're moving all apps to the cloud, but users prefer to use Excel for most tasks. It's not clear to me how to handle MFA or AWS auth challenges in Excel, and we typically end up using Xlwings or similar, which is not very nice.
- D13Fd 4y ago
  Office 365 is the answer to this. Simultaneous editing is pretty incredible and seamless, as is versioning and instant save. Trying to hack in some third party solution is never going to be as good.
grigri907 4y ago
I'd love to drag the formula bar into a vertical column, or its own window, thereby encouraging the use of new lines and indentations in complex formulas for clarity
pjmlp 4y ago
I would state improving the VBA development experience that feels stuck in Office '97 days, but it will most likely be ignored.
qiqitori 4y ago
Regular expressions in formulas. (Preferably Perl-style.) Golfing around with LEFT and MID and LEN and RIGHT gets old after a while, and I believe that regular expressions are much easier to explain to someone than the aforementioned nested formulas. (I have some Excel teaching experience.) Not just matching, regex string replace too. Also, there's always room for adding new options when importing CSVs!
- harperlee 4y ago
  Best to document the steps with intermediate LET expressions.
bradwood 4y ago
Make Excel online have first class support for CSV import and export.
bradwood 4y ago
Pop round to your mates in the MSTeams group and kick their asses for us. /s
harperlee 4y ago
In power query, there is no way to produce a viable hyperlink as a result. I can at most produce a HYPERLINK expression as text but I need to “edit and enter” for it to change to a hyperlink. That’s just a specific case of the general case that power query outputs, when being formulas, can’t be autoevaluated whenever the query ends - you can just compute inside the query.
harperlee 4y ago
Managing conditional formatting rules is a pain in the ass. They multiply incessantly whenever you cut and paste, the popup is tiny and non-resizable (it could do with a redesign from scratch), and names are not kept as references. Instead, they get saved as range references.
MikusR 4y ago
Can you keep the upcoming UI butchering as opt in for at least 20 years?
LordEthano 4y ago
Hi, I know youve gotten bombarded here - but the single greatest low-effort high-reward change y'all could make would be allowing data labels to be outside the data (immediately above or below). Currently you can only do base, mid, or top. In finance (my field) pretty much all charts have a second ghost bar with the same numeric value put above any bar chart, for the sole purpose of removing the filled color and putting the data label in the base (i.e. immediately above the real bar). You would be a hero to thousands and thousands of junior bankers if you made this change lol.
RtdServer 4y ago
I have a request related to RealTimeData server for Excel. If there is an active running RTD server it suspends updates whenever the scrollbar or mouse is clicked in Excel which means data updates are missed if user scrolls. Can this be changed to keep running so behavior is same as a COM server update? Typically COM server updates will still allow cells to be written to when clicking or scrolling and only suspend when a cell enters edit mode.
_dain_ 4y ago
DUDE, please for the love of god, implement/fix the following following few things and I'll be a happy spreadsheeter: - INCREMENTAL FIND WITHOUT A FAILURE MODAL in the ctrl-f window. Right now, when no match is found, it pops up a modal saying "no match found" that you have to dismiss! Jeff Atwood called this craziness out in 2006 https://blog.codinghorror.com/unnecessary-dialogs-stopping-the-proceedings-with-idiocy/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/unnecessary-dialogs-stopping-t... it's amazing it's still in a flagship Microsoft product in 2022. - REGEX FIND-REPLACE in the ctrl-f window. Put it in an "advanced" tab or something, but it would be invaluable when doing archaeology on some giganormous spreadsheet someone hands off to you, and you have to figure out wtf is going on. Or I need to make a complicated change across the whole spreadsheet and I'm wishing for something like sed or awk. - REGEX match / substitution as a cell formula would be pretty neat too. String processing is pretty tricky as it is. - MULTIPLE-SUBSTITUTION. If I need to replace many substrings in a string, I need to do ="SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(..." etc, it's annoying. Do for SUBSTITUTE what you did for IF: a SUBSTITUTES version (note the S) that would work like: "=SUBSTITUTES(string, substring1, replacement1, substring2, replacement2, ...)" - INDENTING in the formula bar. I don't like having to tap space all the time or copypaste from Notepad++. Also: monospace font in the formula bar, pretty please. - The "trace dependents" / "trace predecessors" thing, when you click on an arrow (hard to click btw, very narrow target), the window that pops up can't be resized, so you can't actually read a long formula. It should be resizable. - You can merge cells horizontally or vertically, but it's generally discouraged in favor of "center across selection". Problem: you can only "center across selection" horizontally. Would be good to be able to do this vertically as well. - When using the "check compatibility" feature, it takes a LOT of clicking through menus to find a possible problem, and then when you click "go to" (I forgot the exact name of the button, but whatever it is you click to see the cell where the incompatibility is), the compatibility checker window you came from disappears. So if you want to find another incompatibility, you have to go through all those menus again. Immense pain. - My excitement of using PowerQuery was matched only by my disappointment of finding out that it doesn't support SQLite databases. - Meta note: I saw someone from the Excel team post on /r/excel a while ago soliciting feedback. I wanted to give some of my own, but I had to go through some dumb bureaucracy, and the data consent form / NDA said Microsoft would get rights over my biometric data or something preposterous like that. I just wanted to give feedback to the Excel devs but not if there's such dystopian nonsense to deal with. Can I just email you? Or you email me, it's in the "about" part of my profile. - A way to track down and squish ALL external links. Sometimes a warning pops up about external references but it's not actionable, because they can be lurking in so many dark corners and there's no way to enumerate all of them. It's not as simple as searching through formulae for things like "C:\"; they can be in weird shit like chart axis labels and conditional formatting and god knows what else. I've had cases where I've been working on a single Excel document as part of a team, and somebody unknowingly introduced external links somewhere, the warning came up, and we couldn't find them. Org policy said we couldn't distribute it if there were external links, so we basically had to "declare bankruptcy" and start again, carefully reproducing our work in a blank document, copying stuff over a piece at a time. - Generally: better tools for understanding a large unfamiliar project. The predecessors / dependents feature is very anemic, but it's about the only thing on the menu right now for understanding macro-scale control flow and data dependence. - Linting / "code quality" tools? I definitely don't want some kind of clippy-esque flow-breaking "it looks like you're using vlookup, did you know xlookup is better?" popup, but maybe some kind of tab or button to highlight formula antipatterns and suggest autofixes. E.g. it could detect nested IF and suggest an equivalent using IFS (flat is better than nested). One thing I've noticed is that experienced Excel users get kind of stuck in their ways and don't know about new features that can simplify things, but if they got used to consulting this system, it would alert them to new features in a natural, non-annoying way. You could put this into the "check for problems" system, people are already used to checking that for version incompatibility and accessibility. .. this is more than a few things, I kept thinking of more stuff as I was writing.
D13Fd 4y ago
Dark mode in the web version please!
D13Fd 4y ago
Also, an option to make arrow keys always move the text cursor in the formula bar and never select cells would be great!

by inglor 4y ago

lolive 4y ago

I really wonder what Excel developpers think of connecting spreadsheets and master data management services so you can link data between a spreadsheet and the master data. [wasn’t it the goal of OData?]

rad_gruchalski 4y ago

Lambdas are awesome but the ui and their management could use some work. It would be great to have a “script” view to manage defined names instead of hacking them one by one. Single line entry isn’t efficient and the default assumption that cursor keys navigate a sheet instead of the formula box, is annoying. I find myself copying formulas out of excel, modifying them in a text editor, and pasting them back.

shiftspace-- 4y ago
Related project: https://aka.ms/get-afe https://aka.ms/get-afe
- nhinck2 4y ago
  And shift space being the most annoying of all. Being in a formula writing a closing brace only to have the formula bar explode because I didn't let go of shift in time. Who wants that?

djbebs 4y ago

Wait really? Well if thats the case, making VLookups be able to use any column as an input or output, rather than being limited to having the input on the left and the output on the right. Ideally I'd be able to have 2 additional parameters, one that would indicate the column where the input value is to be found, and another that would indicated the column from which the output value would come from. I know there are some work arounds, but this would really simplify my life!

djbebs 4y ago
Well half that is already done(the output!)
shiftspace-- 4y ago
Might be what you’re after: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/xlookup-function-b7fd680e-6d10-43e6-84f9-88eae8bf5929 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/xlookup-function-...
Cogito 4y ago
You may already know this, but if not and for others: my Excel files became a lot more manageable, maintainable, and readable when I switched from _LOOKUP() functions to the INDEX-MATCH pattern, and in particular using the pattern with Tables. Basically - Put the data to be looked up in a named Excel Table with a short, meaningful name. `data` is a good default name, but something with more meaning is better. - Put the lookup 'results' in an Excel Table (naming optional but recommended). The output will be one column of the table, with one of the other columns used as input. - Construct the output formula like `=INDEX(data[[value_column]], MATCH([@[input_column]], data[[lookup_column]], 0))`. - (Optional) Put all formulas at the far right of the results table, so that you can copy new data into the left side easily without overwriting the formulas. The MATCH finds the first row in `data` that has the lookup value from `input_column` (in the current table) in the `lookup_column` (in the data table). The INDEX grabs the value from `value_column` of the `data` table in that row. Using Excel Tables helps by making the formulas more readable, and resistant to change. If new columns are added or removed the formulas continue to work (not true for how most _LOOKUP formulas are written), and the formula gets copied down to new rows as you add them. You can switch to row lookups if needed (though you can't really use Excel Tables anymore) if you need dynamic lookups you can specify both row and column as MATCHes in the INDEX formula (and INDEX against the whole `data` table instead of just one column). Something like `=INDEX(data, MATCH([@[input_column]], data[[lookup_column]], 0), MATCH([@[column_name]], data[#Headers], 0))`.
- rr888 4y ago
  I was going to reply with this too. Joel Spolsky explains it well https://youtu.be/0nbkaYsR94c?t=1824 https://youtu.be/0nbkaYsR94c?t=1824

jklinger410 4y ago

Please bring back CTRL+SHIFT+V as paste values only

aargh_aargh 4y ago
Ctrl-Shift-S? What did it ever do to hurt anyone that it had to go?
alach11 4y ago
The solution for this (in most MS Office products) is CTRL+V then CTRL then T. Annoying, I know.
ies7 4y ago
I still use the old excel way: Alt+E, A, V
benhurmarcel 4y ago
https://stevemiller.net/puretext/ https://stevemiller.net/puretext/

aargh_aargh 4y ago

Bring back Access. I understand it needs to be rebuilt, so probably build it on top of sqlite. There's nothing (popular) in the niche left by Access.

D13Fd 4y ago
I love excel, but Access is a nightmare by comparison. It sits in exactly the wrong spot on the power/usability curve. It it's super easy to create a crappy database and hard to make a good one.

zerr 4y ago

Why there is no "Check spelling as you type" in Excel?

rr888 4y ago

Wow great, I used to customize Excel a lot for financial companies. VBA was good enough until about 20 years ago. VSTO was never as good because you need admin rights to install it. ExcelDNA was much better. I gave up 10 years ago so dont know what is going on now tbh. Right now I use Python and Pandas, mostly doing the same stuff but with more rows and a worse experience. If you could find an easy way to combine Python and Excel it would be awesome. Like embedding Python instead of VBA? Would need sandboxing.

bhewes 4y ago
We use Xlwings. Xlwings pro allows for embedded python. We use xltrails to version control our excel files with embedded python and/or VBA.

knolan 4y ago

I miss the interactivity of selecting data in older versions of Excel (pre 2007). You can see the data ranges highlighted when you select a series on the plot and you could drag them as desired. Currently it’s very awkward and unintuitive why you can move ydata but not xdata.

ant6n 4y ago

Python support

HHC-Hunter 4y ago

LiamMcCalloway 4y ago

I'm a glass half full kinda of kind, but for excel, the glass is Feb 1st. Please, types would really help. Maybe as a property of named ranges ?

not_a_sw_dork 4y ago

All concerning Excel Online: - Ctrl+F3 to bring up the name manager (unless its already there somehow?) - the full functionality of Conditional formatting, f.e. not all formatting rules can be used Both are requiring me to open files stored on Sharepoint via the desktop app frequently.

Enginerrrd 4y ago

Ok, besides python support... The thing I'd like more than anything: A better way to edit cell with really long function calls. If nothing else, add color coded parenthesis to the bar at the top and not just in the cell. Like, sometimes you just need some if/else statements... but try to parse and edit even something fairly simple like: =IF(AND(LongExpression > 3, Other_longexpression<5),AnotherLongExpression, IF(AND(LongExpression>5,Other_longexpression<10), AnotherLongExpression, 0)) Even with the color-coded parentheses, this is really hard! And God Forbid all those "LongExpression" have a bunch of parenthesis and PEMDAS that needs to be respected. It's... really goddamn tedious. I lost track of the parenthesis while writing that in this window ...However, if I could just have a little popout window where I could add arbitrary new/lines and spaces, that would make a difficult thing into something downright enjoyable and productive. Something like: =IF( AND( LongExpression > 3, Other_longexpression<5 ), AnotherLongExpression, IF( AND( LongExpression>5, Other_longexpression<10 ), AnotherLongExpression, 0 ) ) Would make things much easier to parse.

collegeburner 4y ago
+1 for python support. getting vba versions right for stuff that expects to interface through it can be a bitch if some vendor doesn't update stuff. you pay some stupid amount for a financial data product then it's like "lol this doesn't work with your version of office install 2016". not really excel dev's but python would be nice.
RodgerTheGreat 4y ago
FYI, the formula bar in Excel is resizable already. Expand the bar (or drag the vertical resize handle at its bottom edge), and then you can use alt+enter to insert a newline.
- ant6n 4y ago
  It's like coding in an adversarial text window -- the font isn't monospace, there's no syntax highlighting, no auto-indent based on parenthesis, and when you accidentally hit enter (instead of ctrl+enter) you leave the text editor (and then it'll pop up with complaints about your function not being parseable). Also, dragging the size of the edit box bigger means you won't get much of a view of your spreadsheet -- it would probably be nice to attach the edit window on the right (if it was turned into a proper formula editor).

not_a_sw_dork 4y ago

Oh, and: - The name manager is relatively cumbersome to use. F.e. at least some copy/clone functionality would be nice. - Excel table columns cannot be directly used for DVL lists, you need to create additional named ranges pointing to them. - Once Excel tables have been created, afaik it is not yet possible to extend them by additional columns, respective edit their defined ranges? - RegExp support for DVLs, w/o having to rely on VBA (desktop only) or OfficeScript (Online only)

blahedo 4y ago

I regularly use gnumeric for my serious spreadsheet work because Excel can't keep up, and I'm always a little surprised when I have to send a spreadsheet to someone and I find yet another thing that Excel doesn't do; I haven't kept a written list but here's a few off the top of my head (of varying levels of seriousness): - Excel still gets very confused if you have different files with the same filenames in different directories. At one point it would even, if you crashed while editing one `grades.xlsx` file and went to edit a different `grades.xlsx` on restarting, it would restore the new one from the old swap file, silently clobbering data. - Last I checked, Excel can't do a lot of very basic data graphing (histograms are the ones that I've run into most often). - Some versions of Excel (the web one, I think) will just silently not format text that is rotated, making some spreadsheets completely illegible - I got immediately attached to CSE formulas once I discovered them---they do a lot of things I'd always thought I had to build a custom program for---but 90% of the time when I build and debug something in gnumeric with a CSE formula, it works just as I expected based on experience with abstraction and data structures in other languages, but then when I bring it over to Excel to share with other people, one or more of the Excel functions just don't work properly when lifted over arrays. Then I have to go create an explicit area of the sheet (or another sheet) for my intermediate data and copy formulas to make the computation work, ugh. I really want every single function that normally takes non-range arguments and produces a single value to map over a provided range and produce an array when dropped in a CSE formula. (PS to everyone: if you've never crossed paths with "Control-Shift-Enter formulas", look them up and they'll change your life) Good to know about the feedback box, though.

jonemi 4y ago

Why doesn't CTRL+Backspace delete a word when editing a cell?

Enginerrrd 4y ago

Another one: There's something horribly un-optimized going on when I click and drag some values to a new location. Even when there's no overlap, dragging a tiny number of values, like say 3, ends up hanging for several seconds on my very fast computer. I remember this also didn't used to happen back ~2011-2013 ish, and then I remember it started happening at some point and hasn't been fixed since.

abtinf 4y ago

Wishlist: A way to truely, honestly, for the love of god, please, I beg you for mercy, force all pivot tables to fully refresh everything about themselves — their data, caches, retained items, etc. Better pivot table value formatting: use the formatting from the source data set, let me format multiple value columns at once, or apply formatting from value cells to the value columns themselves. Please let me hide everything from a pivot table except for value columns. There are many scenarios where I would like to insert two pivot tables right next to each other, then have a third columns that refers to their cells for a calculation. I don’t need any of the other pivot table options to be available to the user. Dynamic array and lambda functions are not a substitute, because they do not cache results, which causes significant performance problems. A workbook level option to open the workbook in a new process that doesn’t allow interaction with other workbooks. Sometimes, I build computationally intensive standalone workbooks that my users hate to have open, because they degrade performance for all of their other open workbooks. They have to resort to using excel online (or the outlook web preview) to be able to have my workbook open for reference while working on something else. Freeze(x) or Staticize(x): a function that evaluates once and retains its value. I know a similar effect is possible by enabling iterative calculation, but that feels hacky and I don’t know what else is affected by turning iterative calculation on (the fact that it is disabled by default implies significant consequences). In Power Query, a way to append the content of a table to another table, on every Refresh All. This would make it much easier to create snapshots and temporal reports. E.g. I want to know what the value of all sales orders as they were reported each day, verses what I can infer from the database today. I love all the investment in Excel! Are you hiring?

harry8 4y ago

I don't want this to sound snarky but I don't know how to phrase it better. How is the excel team going at fixing the calculation bugs nowadays after wilfully ignoring them for deacdes? Do you have the management buy in to calculate correctly given that's kind of what excel is meant to do? https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1198/tas.2011.09076 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1198/tas.2011.09076 Sometime in the early to mid noughts I recall MS announcing they'd fixed rand() returning a random number between 0 and 1. Someone filled a page with =rand(), set a conditional format, it recalculate a few times and watched many cells turning red showing a negative number. I replicated this at the time. Still? www.gnumeric.org is what I've used when needing a spreadsheet because of those issues and the refusal to fix them. Annoying ui changes happened instead...

Balgair 4y ago

1. Some sort of toggle somewhere for dates before 1900 being supported just like dates after 1900. I work with a lot of historical baseball data with dates before 1900. Constantly having to do string conversions to math and then back again is so tiring. Every time I port in data, I have to clean it up, and every time it screws up in some new and novel way. Yes, I'm aware that XL's date automatic date conversion causes havoc in genetic data sets as is. And yes, I know that it would cause further havoc if pre-1900 dates were automatically seen as dates. But some toggle somewhere that I could just click once and then be done with it would save me weeks of time. 2. Again, another toggle that keeps acutes, tildes, and other letters as separate from their non-marked twins when sorting alphabetically or otherwise processing data. Currently when I sort baseball players by name, alphabetically, the 'á' and 'a' or 'ñ' and 'n' are seen as the same letter and sorted intermixed. This is a huge problem when dealing with Central American, South American, and Caribbean players. Common names like José are not the same as Jose. Same goes for string comprehension functions or searching.

croes 4y ago

Make that Excel auto conversions can be switched off entirely

pillefitz 4y ago

A simple way to connect to the cloud. We're moving all apps to the cloud, but users prefer to use Excel for most tasks. It's not clear to me how to handle MFA or AWS auth challenges in Excel, and we typically end up using Xlwings or similar, which is not very nice.

D13Fd 4y ago
Office 365 is the answer to this. Simultaneous editing is pretty incredible and seamless, as is versioning and instant save. Trying to hack in some third party solution is never going to be as good.

grigri907 4y ago

I'd love to drag the formula bar into a vertical column, or its own window, thereby encouraging the use of new lines and indentations in complex formulas for clarity

pjmlp 4y ago

I would state improving the VBA development experience that feels stuck in Office '97 days, but it will most likely be ignored.

qiqitori 4y ago

Regular expressions in formulas. (Preferably Perl-style.) Golfing around with LEFT and MID and LEN and RIGHT gets old after a while, and I believe that regular expressions are much easier to explain to someone than the aforementioned nested formulas. (I have some Excel teaching experience.) Not just matching, regex string replace too. Also, there's always room for adding new options when importing CSVs!

harperlee 4y ago
Best to document the steps with intermediate LET expressions.

bradwood 4y ago

Make Excel online have first class support for CSV import and export.

bradwood 4y ago

Pop round to your mates in the MSTeams group and kick their asses for us. /s

harperlee 4y ago

In power query, there is no way to produce a viable hyperlink as a result. I can at most produce a HYPERLINK expression as text but I need to “edit and enter” for it to change to a hyperlink. That’s just a specific case of the general case that power query outputs, when being formulas, can’t be autoevaluated whenever the query ends - you can just compute inside the query.

harperlee 4y ago

Managing conditional formatting rules is a pain in the ass. They multiply incessantly whenever you cut and paste, the popup is tiny and non-resizable (it could do with a redesign from scratch), and names are not kept as references. Instead, they get saved as range references.

MikusR 4y ago

Can you keep the upcoming UI butchering as opt in for at least 20 years?

LordEthano 4y ago

Hi, I know youve gotten bombarded here - but the single greatest low-effort high-reward change y'all could make would be allowing data labels to be outside the data (immediately above or below). Currently you can only do base, mid, or top. In finance (my field) pretty much all charts have a second ghost bar with the same numeric value put above any bar chart, for the sole purpose of removing the filled color and putting the data label in the base (i.e. immediately above the real bar). You would be a hero to thousands and thousands of junior bankers if you made this change lol.

RtdServer 4y ago

I have a request related to RealTimeData server for Excel. If there is an active running RTD server it suspends updates whenever the scrollbar or mouse is clicked in Excel which means data updates are missed if user scrolls. Can this be changed to keep running so behavior is same as a COM server update? Typically COM server updates will still allow cells to be written to when clicking or scrolling and only suspend when a cell enters edit mode.

_dain_ 4y ago

DUDE, please for the love of god, implement/fix the following following few things and I'll be a happy spreadsheeter: - INCREMENTAL FIND WITHOUT A FAILURE MODAL in the ctrl-f window. Right now, when no match is found, it pops up a modal saying "no match found" that you have to dismiss! Jeff Atwood called this craziness out in 2006 https://blog.codinghorror.com/unnecessary-dialogs-stopping-the-proceedings-with-idiocy/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/unnecessary-dialogs-stopping-t... it's amazing it's still in a flagship Microsoft product in 2022. - REGEX FIND-REPLACE in the ctrl-f window. Put it in an "advanced" tab or something, but it would be invaluable when doing archaeology on some giganormous spreadsheet someone hands off to you, and you have to figure out wtf is going on. Or I need to make a complicated change across the whole spreadsheet and I'm wishing for something like sed or awk. - REGEX match / substitution as a cell formula would be pretty neat too. String processing is pretty tricky as it is. - MULTIPLE-SUBSTITUTION. If I need to replace many substrings in a string, I need to do ="SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(..." etc, it's annoying. Do for SUBSTITUTE what you did for IF: a SUBSTITUTES version (note the S) that would work like: "=SUBSTITUTES(string, substring1, replacement1, substring2, replacement2, ...)" - INDENTING in the formula bar. I don't like having to tap space all the time or copypaste from Notepad++. Also: monospace font in the formula bar, pretty please. - The "trace dependents" / "trace predecessors" thing, when you click on an arrow (hard to click btw, very narrow target), the window that pops up can't be resized, so you can't actually read a long formula. It should be resizable. - You can merge cells horizontally or vertically, but it's generally discouraged in favor of "center across selection". Problem: you can only "center across selection" horizontally. Would be good to be able to do this vertically as well. - When using the "check compatibility" feature, it takes a LOT of clicking through menus to find a possible problem, and then when you click "go to" (I forgot the exact name of the button, but whatever it is you click to see the cell where the incompatibility is), the compatibility checker window you came from disappears. So if you want to find another incompatibility, you have to go through all those menus again. Immense pain. - My excitement of using PowerQuery was matched only by my disappointment of finding out that it doesn't support SQLite databases. - Meta note: I saw someone from the Excel team post on /r/excel a while ago soliciting feedback. I wanted to give some of my own, but I had to go through some dumb bureaucracy, and the data consent form / NDA said Microsoft would get rights over my biometric data or something preposterous like that. I just wanted to give feedback to the Excel devs but not if there's such dystopian nonsense to deal with. Can I just email you? Or you email me, it's in the "about" part of my profile. - A way to track down and squish ALL external links. Sometimes a warning pops up about external references but it's not actionable, because they can be lurking in so many dark corners and there's no way to enumerate all of them. It's not as simple as searching through formulae for things like "C:\"; they can be in weird shit like chart axis labels and conditional formatting and god knows what else. I've had cases where I've been working on a single Excel document as part of a team, and somebody unknowingly introduced external links somewhere, the warning came up, and we couldn't find them. Org policy said we couldn't distribute it if there were external links, so we basically had to "declare bankruptcy" and start again, carefully reproducing our work in a blank document, copying stuff over a piece at a time. - Generally: better tools for understanding a large unfamiliar project. The predecessors / dependents feature is very anemic, but it's about the only thing on the menu right now for understanding macro-scale control flow and data dependence. - Linting / "code quality" tools? I definitely don't want some kind of clippy-esque flow-breaking "it looks like you're using vlookup, did you know xlookup is better?" popup, but maybe some kind of tab or button to highlight formula antipatterns and suggest autofixes. E.g. it could detect nested IF and suggest an equivalent using IFS (flat is better than nested). One thing I've noticed is that experienced Excel users get kind of stuck in their ways and don't know about new features that can simplify things, but if they got used to consulting this system, it would alert them to new features in a natural, non-annoying way. You could put this into the "check for problems" system, people are already used to checking that for version incompatibility and accessibility. .. this is more than a few things, I kept thinking of more stuff as I was writing.

D13Fd 4y ago

Dark mode in the web version please!

D13Fd 4y ago

Also, an option to make arrow keys always move the text cursor in the formula bar and never select cells would be great!