Excel on a Mac - My Experience
Posted
Sun, Jul 5 2009 12:43
by
Nate Oliver
Okay, let's take Excel 2008 off the table, it ships VBA-less; this is a deal-breaker for me. Note, this is simply my thoughts based on my brief experience, i.e., if you enjoy using Excel on your Mac, more power to you. And this is my take on an out-of-the-box interface, itself, not attempting to set up Jet Connections, etc...
I conducted a poll at MrExcel.com, to see if people with PC vs. Mac Excel experience preferred one to the other. The turn-out was underwhelming, but the majority does appear to favor the PC, and can be found, here:
http://www.mrexcel.com/forum/showthread.php?t=353557
I had never worked with Excel on a Mac, until recently. I do pro bono consulting for the Women's Professional Billiards Association (WPBA), and my contact, on their Board of Directors, uses a Mac. Right, so I was off to North Carolina to provide training and some non-trivial project-work, on a Mac.
Nice enough looking machine; however, there were a couple of things that were driving me batty while trying to simply work with Excel on a Mac.
No right-click. I knew before I even jumped on this thing that it's not available, but that didn't stop me, it's engrained in my brain. Perhaps I didn't realize just how much I right-click? Quick sort? Quickly set some Column Widths? Paste Special? Forget about it, you're going to the menu. I can't recall why I was attempting to right-click so much, but I must have done it 10 times in an hour. This being the working definition of insanity - attempting the same thing over and over again while expecting different results.
There's probably a simple fix for this, a key combination perhaps, but we didn't know it: the F-keys don't work? I like my F-keys too, apparently. I know I tried to use F2 and F9 while auditing some Worksheet Functions, and nothing. The one F-key combination that did work was Alt-F11, more on this in a moment.
I found myself missing normal keyboard keys. There is no Delete key, there is, but it functions like a Backspace. The Mac's keyboard is missing other keys, too, like End? Someone help me out here (I only did this for 2 hours). It's missing a key that I use a lot for scrolling, must be End...
And for my favorite drain-bamager... Like I said, Alt-F11 works, nice. So I get back into the Project, add a Module, I am ready to rip. When I write a lot of code that interacts with complex Worksheet data I tend to jump back and forth between the front and back end of Excel quite a bit; here's where the fun really begins.
So I flip back to the Worksheet, look my data, flip back to the Project. The Project's still open, but the Module's gone. Where did that thing go? At this point, I feel like I'm watching Eddie Murphy's 'Delirious', where Eddie's old man calls the family dog, Cocoa, and that dog is outta there. Where the [bleep] is that dog going?! "The dog is stupid, Eddie!"
I'm messing around in the Project Explorer, I can't get this thing to maximize? Fine, I kill the VBE, and step into the procedure from the front-end. Again, more working definition of insanity, I repeat said view flip; it's gone again. My contact says, "I bet I know where it is." She cursors over to the left side of the screen, in the VBE, and this magical, vertical task bar appears from out of nowhere. If you cursor down to the very lower-left of the screen, at this point, there's your Module. I would have never found that thing!
Performance was fine, other than an issue with Variant Arrays, but the interface almost drove me insane - or, maybe it did. Not quite like a fish being out of water, but it was just different enough where every few minutes or so I found myself wondering "Wait a second, here. What?"
Granted, I'm very new to that interface, so I was probably guilty of some Mac-Newb gaffers.