[eeratm]

Hello all,

I am a switcher and just purchased my first mac(17" powerbook). I was just curious to know if using office v.X is a good solution for using excel. Will it give you the same functionality as the pc version. Any help or thoughts would help. Thanks.

[Ω]

Simple answer, yes.

Only annoying thing is not having an extended keyboard on a PB.

[-Q-]

I do this all the time and it works great. I'd say 99% of the applications operate identicaly, with only some minor places where the UI has forced something to be changed. Overall, it works very, very well.

[typ993]

We do a lot of business model development work in Excel (including some computationally intensive stuff). We use Macs as our primary computers (less virus worries, easier to use and maintain) and use PCs for testing.

As other posters mention, the Mac version is mostly identical to the PC version. In some cases, the interface is actually better (e.g., visually indicating hidden columns).

The only real deficiency I've noticed is in the Visual Basic Editor, where the Mac functionality is less. They actually took features out in Office98 that were in Excel 5. Still pissed about that.

[MartiNZ]

I have also found the compatibility to be pretty good, and I think that Excel v.X is better than Excel XP in some respects - notably we don't have the utterly annoying task-pain things, we don't have the out-of-control speed scrolling (although we wouldn't mind it a bit faster!) and of course, text and graphs and such look better with quartz smoothing, IMO at least .

There are some oddities - I haven't printed much from Excel v.X, but it suggests that, on a blank spreadsheet, only columns A-F will fit on the first page of A4.. and the same document viewed in Excel XP says it will fit A-J - this can be a pain, as can the fact that Excel v.X uses Verdana as its default font. I have changed this to Arial for compatibility but still find that it is not quite perfect going between the platforms, in terms of things like column widths being sufficient on one but not on the other.

Other than that, there are some better keyboard shortcuts by default: we have CMD-E for centre align and CMD-R for right align, for instance. And there are some non-obvious keyboard shortcuts that don't go directly across: F2 for edit cell on PC becomes CTRL-U and F4 for toggle relative and absolute values in formulae becomes CMD-T. I found that one out just recently - it was the last thing that was annoying me .

But yeah, overall I'd have to agree that it is perfectly useable and should only improve with the new updates - although it is microsoft so I can't guarantee it!

[-Q-]

Originally posted by MartiNZ:
But yeah, overall I'd have to agree that it is perfectly useable and should only improve with the new updates - although it is microsoft so I can't guarantee it!

Boy I hope so. But after playing with the steaming pile of crappy bits that is Dreamweaver MX 2004 I'm not holding my breath. New doesn't always mean better. But if I can save a document w/more than 31 characters in the new office, I'll forgive a performance hit.

[MartiNZ]

Good call. It would be nice to be able to get files sent from Windows that didn't end up being called like 'Whatever Spread#34289.xls'!

And while I haven't used Dreamweaver, I do know what you mean. I did do some work using the trial of Freehand MX, but found that the earlier Freehand 10 was much better for it as it didn't take 30 seconds to nudge the image one space and, well, basically, it didn't crash!