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Doc HM · May 12, 2012, 03:53 AM

Anyone here a whizz with Excel.

A client of mine has a fairly complex excel file. It works fine on the PC version of Excel but has issues with some drop down menus on any Mac.

Anyone know why this might be? Tried Exel 2008 and 2011 on several Macs but all have the same issues. Client can mail file from a Mac to a PC an it's fine, but not working again when it comes back.

Can email the file if anyone want to take a look.

Thanks

ghporter · May 12, 2012, 07:53 AM

I'm no wiz, but I'll bet the menus require vBasic or other scripting that depends on Windows resources. Lacking those resources, the file would fail only in the areas the required them.

cgc · May 12, 2012, 10:37 AM

Excel 2011 for Mac has VBA so it should work. I have both Excel 2010 and Excel 2011 so I could check it out but I'll be out Sunday and Monday...if you could wait PM me and I'll look at it.

turtle777 · May 12, 2012, 01:06 PM

I'm a Excel whizz on Excel for Windows, but Excel for Mac (even 2011) is a crapshoot.
I have encountered many weird behaviors on Excel 2011, some of them just formatting, some of them breaking things.

My conclusion: If you need to use Excel productively, stick to Excel for one OS, preferably Windows.
As much as I love my Mac, I'd probably shoot myself if I had to use Excel 2011 on a daily basis for productive work purposes.

-t

cgc · May 12, 2012, 01:29 PM

Originally Posted by turtle777

I'm a Excel whizz on Excel for Windows, but Excel for Mac (even 2011) is a crapshoot.
I have encountered many weird behaviors on Excel 2011, some of them just formatting, some of them breaking things.

My conclusion: If you need to use Excel productively, stick to Excel for one OS, preferably Windows.
As much as I love my Mac, I'd probably shoot myself if I had to use Excel 2011 on a daily basis for productive work purposes.

-t

Yup...I prefer Excel 2010 in Parallels vs Excel 2011 in OSX. Haven't had any issues using complex Excel files in one or the other OS but Excel 2011 feels slower and clunkier than Excel 2010.

Doc HM · May 12, 2012, 03:22 PM

fancy taking a quick look turtle?

P · May 13, 2012, 12:39 PM

Originally Posted by cgc

Excel 2011 for Mac has VBA so it should work.

Well yes, if you've spent some time making it work on both Windows and Macs. Certain things (like default file locations) are completely different and need to be "ported".

turtle777 · May 13, 2012, 03:07 PM

From what I can see, the file does not use VBA at all.

I assume the drop-down menu is realized via a table and Validation - List, but I can't take a look because the file is protected. The list seems endlessly long, so my assumption would be that the issue is merely a performance issue, a general problem with Excel for Mac.

(I was able to select entries from the drop-down menu, but I get beach balls all the time, it's very slow.)

-t

turtle777 · May 13, 2012, 03:22 PM

Ok, I removed the password protection.
As I suspected, the drop-downs is realized via List items from a reference area.

The performance issues with this sheet is caused by two things:
a) the drop-down lists
b) the VLOOKUP formulas in columns G, H and I

In both cases, Excel 2011 is the culprit, the performance is just that bad.
There are probably smarter ways that can replace the VLOOKUP and gain some performance, but the drop-down performance issue will remain.

-t

ghporter · May 14, 2012, 05:44 AM

So it's features that don't run smoothly and don't translate across platforms, rather than VBA. I'm pleasantly surprised.

turtle777 · May 14, 2012, 08:05 AM

Originally Posted by ghporter

So it's features that don't run smoothly and don't translate across platforms, rather than VBA. I'm pleasantly surprised.

Yes and no, it's Excel 2011 as a whole that's a dog, and any more demanding feature (e.g. complex formulas, lookup tables, pivot tables) make it crap out performance wise.

In other words, the performance of Excel 2011 is always bad, but you won't notice in a simple spreadsheet.

-t