Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I just purchased this as an upgrade to MS Office 2004. First thing I did was to open a spreadsheet from Excel 2004. It gave me an error of "File error: data may have been lost.", which it does every time I open up this file. I'm not sure yet why it is having this problem. So, then I proceeded to create my very first new spreadsheet with Excel 2011. I've locked up Excel twice so far--my first hour of use and it has already crashed two times! I have, btw, a brand new 27" iMac with the latest Snow Leopard on it--this is as good as it gets for an OS and machine platform to run it on. I've also noticed it getting confused several times and garbling text elements on charts when I do something to the data format elsewhere on the chart. Even if it did work, the UI is convoluted and confusing. I could probably get used to it in time, but there's nothing elegant about how they've constructed their UI. There are also some obvious bugs that (as a software developer myself) I am amazed could make it into a released version of software. When you enter a label for a data series on a chart, for instance, Excel automatically adds double quotes around it the next time you edit it. If you then edit the contents inside the double quotes again, Excel will add an additional pair of double quotes around the first pair that it added, and then proceed to display your chart with visible quotes around all of the values! This is the sort of bug that should have been found during unit testing by whatever developer was writing that feature. If one of my software developers were to miss something like that, I'd be annoyed--and if my system test team missed something like that for a release, I'd want to assemble a new team. I had much higher hopes for this--thinking that it at least shouldn't be nearly as buggy as older versions. Yet so far, it's far less stable than Excel 2004 (I haven't tested Word and PP yet). It's just not a quality piece of software.