Microsoft Excel Ratings and Reviews

I am using an iPad Pro 256GB Wifi + Cellular version and I am extremely disappointed on the speed and features of the app. Not sure if the app or iPad Pro is to blame but the vlookup, match functions are just not working as gracefully as it should be. Each time I input a number, it would take 5 seconds to return the correct values and it is just not acceptable on an advanced device like the iPad Pro. I have to admit that my spreadsheet has over 50,000 of rows, 30+ columns and 10+ spreadsheets but there are no macros and images used at all. And for anyone who relies on Excel to process this huge amount of data, this is just a very common scale of a spreadsheet, not to mention it is only 10MB. Either Apple or Mircosoft seriously needs to look into resolving this issue or there’s just no point of having this powerful application on the iPad.

I was able to pick up Word and teach myself how to operate it, coming from a completely different word processing background. Way back when a new office mandated Word as the processing program, I said “OK, I’ll be fine.” And I was.

I’ve really tried to do the same thing with Excel. But Excel doesn’t seem to be quite as novice-user-friendly as Word was ~25 years ago. I’m good at math, I’m good working with charts and tables, good handling computations and with setting up patterns for computations, whether by hand or in other programs. But Excel is hard to learn when you don’t have a background in this program specifically, a class on Excel, or you’ve purchased a book (some of which are terribly expensive). I wish there were ways built into the program that made it more intuitive and easier to learn. If there were, I would use it for every data table that required/included columns with numbers, data &/or mathematics. But I don’t have the time to try to teach myself a program that requires significant time learning simple tasks.

I’ve got multiple college degrees, two completely different professional licenses, and a background heavy in science and math. I’m not computer phobic. In fact, I’ve taught other people how to work in other programs & applications. Excel as the first program I haven’t been able to just handle.

I have to build work-arounds in the Ipad version of Excel. The most aggravating one being the fact that I have to be logged into my account in Excel even to work offline. I have to work around that by putting my Ipad in airplane mode. It is not appropriate that the Excel user who chooses the portability of the Ipad should be logged into an online account in order to use the product. And with every new iteration of Microsoft’s renewed user agreement, I grow more suspicious of Microsoft’s encroachment into my privacy. I do not have the time to read the minutia of the dozen pages of legalese. My choices are accept what ever new level of data privacy I am surrendering to Microsoft or don’t use the product. For this reason, I am presently learning Apple’s Number’s program. Once I get used to the loss of functionality Numbers may not have over Excel, I plan to abandon Excel altogether. I realize that there may be limitations on the Ipad version of Excel due to copyright, intellectual property agreements, and patent infringements between Microsoft and Apple, but these petty rivalries only make Microsoft look worse. And it does not excuse Microsoft from not making a fully functional version of Excel that can be used on the Ipad.

I am a Music Education student who is required to take a basic statistics course for my degree. I also used to be an engineering major where we were required to do an advanced statistics course. Not supporting KEY features like the Data Analysis Toolpak in 2021 where many students are using office 365 on tablets is very disappointing from a company that prides itself on its office suite. It puts thousands of students at a disadvantage because they (instead of being able to use their preferred and possibly only personal device) have to go to computer labs on campus, which are not always guaranteed to work or be open when you need them to be, to complete what should really be a mundane class in the curriculum of basically every humanities and social sciences major, and at much higher levels STEM majors. I thought the excel app would be more robust than the google sheets app but it really doesn’t even compete when the main pull to excel is its add-ons and because it does not have those google sheets is really the better option with much more ease of transition between devices.

I like being able to access my excel files from my iPhone. Works great for simple editing and updating. But suddenly I can not edit an excel file that I had created on my laptop and had been able to edit it on my iPhone before. It opens read only and when I try to save it to another name or location it does not allow it because I now must have an Office 360 subscription. I never had one to begin with. I have a one drive account, but that does not get me around this. WHY do I suddenly need an Office 360 subscription? It’s MY file; I created it OUTSIDE of this iPhone app. WHY are you holding me hostage? I can’t find an explanation for why this happened and why I now need the subscription. Google Sheets seems to work just fine and I am now using that instead. Are other Office apps going to do the same thing to me? Incidentally, if you get stuck by this, I finally got around not being able to write the file anywhere by mailing the file to myself from inside the app and then I opened it with Google Sheets.

The app is fine and honestly better than what I expected when I first got my iPad Pro. If you are used to using Excel and are not expecting 100% of the features you find in the desktop version, chances are it will work fine for you.

The one thing I think Microsoft could improve upon dramatically are the keyboard shortcuts. Why would you include the ability to insert a table or an auto sum formula, but not a keyboard shortcut to insert a column or insert a row? It is ridiculous. The best option would be if Microsoft made it so keyboard shortcuts were customizable i.e. you can define your own beyond the preset ones.

I realize it might sound weird to bring up keyboard shortcuts in a review for the iPad version of the app, but I feel like there is probably a lot of overlap between people using a keyboard attachment and people that are regularly using Excel (or similar) on an iPad.

😅 There are problems with Account Sign In. Even though I already have M365 paid account and I signed in with it, Excel still asked me to create new paid account. 😅 Another minor issue is that it doesn’t remember last Zoom level. So have to ALWAYS adjust zoom level for every document that you open. Im surprised that such simple feature as remembering Zoom level is absent from Excel app. 😅 Another thing is it ALWAYS asks to try Excel Prerelease Version in a business bar. But whenever I click it, it first asks to re sign-in, and then Excel opens an Error page with content “Oops, Sorry we couldn’t find what you were looking for”. 😅 And last, the Document Preview on landing page, displays columns K through T. It should start with column A instead, or wherever there is column with content. 😅 Besides those 4 fit and polish issues, Excel works great.

I partly blame this on Apple and partly on Microsoft: but when the WEB VERSION of excel is more fully-featured than your iOS/iPadOS version, you should probably consider why that is the case.

There is absolutely ZERO excuse why Excel (and all the other Office 365 apps) are not fully featured on iPadOS. It’s not even an ARM vs x86 thing anymore as they have clearly brought Office over to apple silicone. Please, for the love of god, I want to actually use excel on my iPad but when it can’t properly function with any modern enterprise-level workbook I just can’t even bother.

Yes, it works for basic Excel functions. If you’re workbook practices are still rooted in what was done back in the 90s and early aughts, this app will be perfectly fine for you. Anybody who works for/with large enterprises who have lots of workbooks, data sheets and external references, steer clear as this will create more headache for you than anything else.

I see that others have already reported this, but the most recent update completely broke the editing feature because you can no longer see the text that you’re trying to edit. Part of the reason this is so disappointing is that this is the third time that a major feature has broken in Excel. In some cases it coincided with an iOS update, but it always seems to take them weeks or even months to fix the problem which is very frustrating. (And with one of the two earlier issues I tried contacting both Apple and Microsoft support and they both kept pointing fingers at each other.). The two earlier issues were: 1). An update that completely broke the dictation feature. 2). An update that broke the “paste special” feature, so if you wanted to only copy the format or contents of a cell you were out of luck.

Wuderlist was a wonderful app. It kept lists, synched across my devices, and across my family (if I choose). I used it to run my life. MS acquired it, changed the name to ToDo, decided it was perfect as an enterprise project management system (it’s not, and I have run big projects), and made it nearly impossible to rely on if you are not sitting at your desk all day like a MS developer. It got rolled into the MS system, and of course double password protected. Right away I hated this—I don’t need my grocery list defended from the Russians. Then it decided that I couldn’t leave it on—it would log me out to protect my data. A big waste of more time. Then it decided I needed to use their proprietary two-party app to provide a backup authentication. Did they even think about how much fun this would be standing in the middle of Home Depot and trying to work through this morass just to verify which woodscrews I wanted to buy? Here’s a hint for the developers—software should help us get stuff done, not be a merry-go-round of interaction with the system. Time to find a new app.