Anonymous
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144 votes20 comments · Excel for Windows (Desktop Application) » Formatting · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Admin →Anonymous
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141 votesAccepting Votes · 16 comments · Excel for Windows (Desktop Application) » Charting, Mapping and Visualizations · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Admin →Anonymous
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201 votes22 comments · Excel for Windows (Desktop Application) » Formatting · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Admin →
Great suggestion, thanks David! And thanks to other people who took the time to clarify/comment on this one. There’s definitely room to tighten this experience up in a number of places. We’re getting a lot of traffic on the site, so please keep voting for the things you care about most to help us do a great job of prioritizing.
Best,
John [MS XL]Anonymous
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215 votes39 comments · Excel for Windows (Desktop Application) » Editing · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Admin →Anonymous
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225 votes29 comments · Excel for Windows (Desktop Application) » Performance · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Admin →
Good news! We have released a few fixes to Insiders to address this issue. If you are on Insiders, please let us know if the fix has worked for you.
The fixes should be in build 11809.10000 and onwards.
-Joe McDaid [Excel Team]
Anonymous
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262 votes11 comments · Excel for Windows (Desktop Application) » Macros and Add-ins · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Admin →
Thanks for the suggestion Nick. We’ve got some related work we’re looking at soon, and we’ll be sure to carefully consider if we can get a fix in for this then. As always, more votes helps – so keep voting for the things you care about most.
Thanks,
John [MS XL]Anonymous
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267 votes21 comments · Excel for Windows (Desktop Application) » Data Import · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Admin →
Hi Ken,
Thanks for logging this suggestion. Yes, this could be quite useful. Others that’re interested in this, please do log your votes so we’ll prioritize this work appropriately.
thanks
Ashvini Sharma
Lead Program Manager
ExcelAnonymous
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283 votes25 comments · Excel for Windows (Desktop Application) » Data Import · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Admin →
Hi Joana & others,
Thanks for logging this suggestion. Yes, being able to protect your queries would be quite useful indeed for delivering solutions. We’ll prioritize this based on the interest, so if you’re reading this and haven’t voted as yet, please do so.
thanks
Ashvini Sharma
Lead Program Manager
ExcelAnonymous
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275 votes36 comments · Excel for Windows (Desktop Application) » Formulas and Functions · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Admin →
Thanks for the suggestion Alex, and thanks to those that making their vote heard. This is a pretty interesting ask – take a look at the comment I made. I’d like us to understand a few related things. And as always, please keep voting for the things you care about most.
Cheers,
John [MS XL]Anonymous
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343 votes129 comments · Excel for Windows (Desktop Application) » Editing · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Admin →Anonymous
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298 votes30 comments · Excel for Windows (Desktop Application) » Formulas and Functions · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Admin →
Thanks for your feedback! We’re reviewing your suggestion. Remember, the more votes a suggestion gets, the more likely it is that we’ll do it.
Anonymous
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442 votes28 comments · Excel for Windows (Desktop Application) » Formulas and Functions · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Admin →
Thanks for the suggestion! We’re fans of Regex and its ability to parse text too.
If you’d like to see Regex support in Excel, please keep the votes rolling in.
- JoeMcD [MS XL]
Anonymous
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681 votes84 comments · Excel for Windows (Desktop Application) » Formulas and Functions · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Admin →
Great suggestion – thanks again for taking the time to put it on this site and for the thoughtful followup comments. This is pretty related to some other work we’ve got going and already has a fair number of votes, so we’ll work on getting plans in place now and hope to get started on this soon.
Thanks,
John [MS XL]Anonymous
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925 votes174 comments · Excel for Windows (Desktop Application) » Editing · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Admin →
Thanks again for all the passion on this issue – we hear you and we’ll get someone on the team to dig in to the issue. I’ve seen a few related sub-issues while scanning over the comment section for this one, so we may reach out to a few of you for clarifications. Thanks again for all the votes, and keep them coming for the issues you care about!
John, Excel
Anonymous
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1,051 votes115 comments · Excel for Windows (Desktop Application) » Charting, Mapping and Visualizations · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Admin →
Thanks for this suggestion! We are evaluating this for a possible future release. Please continue to vote on this idea.
Anonymous
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308 votes63 comments · Excel for Windows (Desktop Application) » Formatting · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Admin →
Thanks for the suggestion Levi! We’ll be taking a look at this along with some other asks around conditional formatting. It’s a big help to see the things with the most votes, particularly within areas like formatting. So please keep the votes coming for things you want us to do sooner!
Thanks,
John [MS XL]Anonymous
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48 votes11 comments · Excel for Windows (Desktop Application) » PivotTables and Power Pivot · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Admin →Anonymous
commented
@Kenneth Barber :
:-( not available for older Excel (2013)Anonymous
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1,142 votes177 comments · Excel for Windows (Desktop Application) » Tables, Sorting and Filtering · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Admin →
Thanks for logging this great suggestion, Zack, and to others for voting it up. We’ll prioritize this according to the number of votes, so if there’s more interest, please make sure to register your vote!
Thanks
Ashvini Sharma
Lead Program Manager
ExcelAnonymous
commented
I don't see how the Excel feature of "tables" (structure references, filters, auto-expand, etc) working with an Excel feature that predates them : the ability to protect sheets, would harm Access.
Tables working would not make Excel a database management system... and tables not working is not preventing some people from using Excel as if it was a DBMS. (anyway this isn't about Access or even about the MS product marketing strategy, this is about the Excel product responding to it's users needs)
Tables make Excel formulas easier to read, maintain and audit. Reducing the risk of having a "bad" Excel sheet giving bad information and leading to catastrophic decisions.
The Excel team made a choice of adding tables to Excel (great choice) and put efforts in developing the tables and structured reference... but they left it unfinished. It works in it's own bubble but not with the parts of Excel that existed before and are key aspects of Excel like the ability to protect a sheet. Before tables, when you had a "data table" on your sheet you could protect the sheet and select to allow rows to be added (among other things)... the use case was supported...
then they give us all those great tools to develop better tables... you spend time learning and creating something great...
then you protect the sheet before sending it out, you select the option to allow adding rows (since the dataset keeps growing)... and you realize it doesn't work...
you do an internet search thinking you forgot something... and then it dawns on you that you lost all that time because you can't use your brand new shiny table in the real world because it doesn't work!
The use case didn't change, they just stopped midway when implementing their new tables!
(... and then you realize the wonderful structured references won't work in conditional formatting or data validation! and those are probably the formulas where it would be the most useful [I don't know about you, but some of my most complex formulas are in the conditional formatting... where I can't "see" the names of the columns/cells I have to reference]...but that's another thread)There's no real Excel evolution because we can't move on to fully adopting and using tables (and other "new features"), because we keep having to go back to the old way of formatting "tables of data" (so we can protect them), of defining ranges and writing formulas...
Excel is great, Excel can feel easy to use... but Excel is also great at making it easy to create good looking spreadsheet that give bad information and can cause a lot of damage to an organization. A lot of people using Excel don't understand it enough to be careful and to know all the pitfalls (and there are many), protecting a sheet gives us a chance of having a reliable spreadsheet so it can give reliable information. The Excel team used to understand that : they gave use the ability to protect sheets. But now they seem to have forgotten that basic fact. Sheet protection doesn't work with tables or with data refresh (another thread). It might look good to add "new" features, but if they don't work with what was there before, if they stop supporting the use cases that brought us to Excel, they should be in their own program. If you don't want to make it work with the "old" Excel, then don't try to past it off as Excel...
Anonymous
commented
This really is a bug and a major one, no voting should be necessary.
This needs to be fixed!
Protecting the structure of a sheet from end users with limited knowledge of Excel is a basic need because the people constructing the sheets and analyzing the data are often not the same people that enter the data day to day. A protected sheet helps both with data integrity and with facilitating data entry.
Tables and structured reference are powerful tools but they just aren't an option when they stop working once you protect a sheet!
(I was so frustrated when I discovered that bug after weeks perfecting a workbook for distribution to data entry people! I couldn't believe it! I finally had to revert to "classic ranges"... what a nightmare that was!)
Anonymous
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5 votes
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798 votes213 comments · Excel for Windows (Desktop Application) » Formatting · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Admin →
Thanks to Graham for starting this conversation. If you would also like Excel to maintain named range references and structured table references in the “applies to” field for Conditional Formatting rules, please add your comments and vote this one up. We will prioritize accordingly.
Thanks,
Steve (MS Excel)Anonymous
commented
@4am : In fact, I think the first time I realized I couldn't use a named range in the "Applies to:" field, I was hoping setting a table column as a named range and applying a conditional formatting rule to that range would allow to paste/remove a row in the middle of the table without having the conditional formatting rules go wild!
:-(Anonymous
commented
This really should have been implemented years ago!
It feels like some great additions to Excel that should make it easier to work with were not completely implemented and now make things messy and hard to work with.
Named ranges, and even more so Tables and structured references, would be so great in making complex sheets easier to read and audit. Making them reliable...
BUT you can't really use them consistently because they don't work with some parts of Excel... it's not like we're talking about different programs here! It should be an evolution... but by being incomplete it keeps causing trouble and we can't move on!
I ended up here because I was looking for a work around for a bug with a "newer" part of Excel : Power Query
When refreshing a table created from a query... the conditional formatting gets all messy (like it would if you added/removed rows in the middle of a table)... I was hoping to use a named range (set to the table, like you have to do to use in a formula for a conditional formatting rule) before I remembered you can't use named ranges in the "applies to" field...
This is so frustrating!
Excel keeps adding "new" features... but they don't work with what was there before! There’s no compatibility INSIDE Excel itself!!! Allowing conditional formatting to be applied to named ranges would allow for many work around so we could use many parts of Excel together...
Please give new feedback!
This issue has been addressed in different suggestions splitting the votes, but it still has quite a number of votes! And please think of the usability of Excel as a whole, many many people who haven't found their way to this suggestion would find their use of Excel simplified and less frustrating with this ability.
New features might be nice marketing, but if you can't use them together with the other parts of the program, you're only failing to meet the expectations you set and eroding the trust in your next promised feature ("Great, something ELSE that won't quite work!")Anonymous
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@Kenneth Barber:
I don't want to derail this thread but while you're absolutely right for Excel itself, I had some slight hopes for the Power Query add-on from july 2018... (for Excel 2013)