Is Excel 365 worth the investment?

[John A]

As an Excel user for 30 years, I have grown accustomed to buying a new version of Excel every 5-7 years. Maybe I have skipped one or two.

I also have a principle of buying up front rather than paying monthly, as I have generally found this much more cost effective.

So I have a lot of resistance to leaving Excel 2017 behind & moving to 365.

Can those of you who have made the jump give me any encouragement?

Thanks for reading.

John

 

[pecoflyer]

Hi
for technical reasons ( I'm on Linux) I didn't make the jump myself.
This being said , being present on different forums I see there are lots of new things available in O365 ( XLOOKUP, SPILL, ...) that seem to be worthwhile.
All depends what you need to do.If you need to send solutions to other people, it might be a problem ( I also seem to have understood that VBA is different).
Can't you get atrial version for a short period?

 

[Peter Bartholomew]

This is as much a matter of psychology as finance. Are you the sort of person that reacts badly to change or do you rush to embrace it? Excel 365 has changed so radically that it may be regarded as a different application. It does still have the ability to run legacy spreadsheets, and even XLM macro sheets, but that is no longer of any particular importance.

For me, my time programming Excel is focussed entirely on the manipulation of arrays, most formulas introduce intermediate named variables by using the LET function, which also serves to reduce the need for helper ranges and largely removes the nesting of elements of a formula. I have consigned legacy spreadsheets to the trash-can of time and will never use one again but you might feel entirely the opposite way.

 

[John A]

Hi
for technical reasons ( I'm on Linux) I didn't make the jump myself.
This being said , being present on different forums I see there are lots of new things available in O365 ( XLOOKUP, SPILL, ...) that seem to be worthwhile.
All depends what you need to do.If you need to send solutions to other people, it might be a problem ( I also seem to have understood that VBA is different).
Can't you get atrial version for a short period?

Thank you, pecoflyer. That's really helpful.
I will need to look into the changes to the VBA as I do rely on using simple macros from time to time.
I trial does sound a good idea but I haven't seen this offered.

 

[Peter Bartholomew]

@pecoflyer
VBA is the same unless you are talking about 365 online, where VBA (and hence event handlers) simply do not exist. In the on-line version, a scripting language (Typescript) is gradually being rolled out and a fair proportion of the Excel Object model is accessible.

 

[pecoflyer]

@Peter Bartholomew I was under the impression that there were differences between say XL 2010 and later versions and that macros were not always compatible? If not so, my mistake.

 

[Peter Bartholomew]

@pecoflyer
Hi, I'm not a frequent user of VBA but I didn't notice any significant changes going from Office 2010 to 365. My most recent venture into VBA was to allow me to develop a formula (actually a recursive λ-function) and upload it to a defined name at the push of a button. This was somewhat removed from my 2010 experience where I had used Class modules to turn datasets into process diagrams or, conversely, to draw the diagrams and generate the dataset.

 

[AlanSidman]

I like the intellisense offered in Power Query/Get and Transform in 365. I find that for me it is novel as I am no longer employed and use it primarily to help others. I like what you can do with PQ. The fact that new updates are transmitted on regular basis is nice. I don't think that desk licenses will be available in the future. I think that if you want to update after 2019 version your only option will be 365. It time to get used to the new paradigm of renting/leasing software.