Forum Discussion
List of missing features in Excel Online
In theory Microsoft 365 Roadmap | Microsoft 365 , but not all functionality is mentioned here. Unfortunately there is no such source, that's different forums, twitter, etc. Word of mouth.
Differences between using a workbook in the browser and in Excel
Excel for the web looks a lot like the Excel desktop app. However, there are some differences to be aware of. For example, not all file formats are supported, and some features may work differently than the desktop app. This article explains these differences.
In the End Please don't forget, Excel Online is FREE while it's traditional version costs about $ 129 for you to install it to your workstation. Excel Online is basically Microsoft's answer to Google Sheets.
So if you're familiar with how Google Sheets works, that's basically what Excel Online is: a free web-based platform.
I would be happy to know if I could help with this information.
Nikolino
I know I don't know anything (Socrates)
To be fair, Google Sheets is also free. I've been a bit confused at Microsoft dropping features from excel over time. Excel 2011 had more features and capability than Excel 2016, which in turn has slightly more features and capability than the online Excel app as of right now. I jumped into an Office 365 trial for our small business to try to work with a large, complex data set that I was able to create a graph for on my old laptop in my old version of excel and the web app for excel can't handle the graph and doesn't have the convenient features to edit and work with data. This seems like a huge regression. Mind you, I mentioned that we started a 365 trial subscription for our business (and *may* start paying for it next month if it seems worth it, but as of right now I'm really not inspired. I would have wanted more functionality and versatility than a prior excel version if I'm going to be paying for a subscription).
I don't think it makes much of a comparison to say that "it's free and that's why it's missing features" when even the paid version is missing those features and functionality. Sure, you can have free vs premium tiers of a software and have the functionality go along with that, but to even have the paid version lacking functionality isn't really inspiring for such a mainstay software.
That's just my take and surprise from it.
It's been almost a year - I've developed several pretty complex applications using Google Sheets. It's pretty impressive at this point. It has a *very* sophisticated macro language and available libraries - it supports links to remote SQL databases for example. It's *far* superior to Excel online at this point, and can give Excel desktop a run for it's money in many use cases. The one pain point is linking to other spreadsheets. This is trivially easy in Excel desktop, awkward in Google sheets, and not possible in Excel online (afaik).
