Re: Mac Purchase ?? Isabel802

[mikerickson]

Re: Mac Purchase ?? Isabel802

Your inbox is full, so I can't respond to your PM. So I'll post my reply here so that others can add their opinions about switching from Windows Excel to Mac.


There are several features of Windows Excel that aren't available to a Mac. Most noticeably, Mac will not support ActiveX controls. The file handling features of Mac VBA are flawed and I find it easier to use the MacScript function to access Applescript than to use Dir, etc.

If you plan to go to a pure Mac use, i.e use only files created on a Mac, I wouldn't recommend against it. If you are going to be use a variety of files, some created on Windows (by other people) and some created on Mac, I'd recommend a Windows platform.

One configuration, that I'm not familiar with, would be to use Excel 2010 on a Windows operating system on a Mac via Parallels. I don't know if that platform will support ActiveX, the Dictionary object or Windows API functions. (I suspect not ActiveX as Mac considers that a security risk).

You might post a thread asking for opinions to get a wide range of inputs.

 

[hrlngrv]

Re: Mac Purchase ?? Isabel802

Mac versions of Excel which support VBA (so excluding Excel 2008) should support class modules. If so, then if these Mac Excel versions don't support the Windows Scripting Runtime which contains the Dictionary object, you could roll your own Dictionary class. It only requires separate arrays for Items and Keys and a Long for Count as the private data members. You'd need a private lookup function into the Keys array to return the array index number. Maybe not for the newbie VBA programmer, but not unduly difficult.

 

[RoryA]

Re: Mac Purchase ?? Isabel802

One configuration, that I'm not familiar with, would be to use Excel 2010 on a Windows operating system on a Mac via Parallels. I don't know if that platform will support ActiveX, the Dictionary object or Windows API functions. (I suspect not ActiveX as Mac considers that a security risk).

Since it is running within Windows, all the Windows functionality is there so ActiveX, Dictionaries and API all work.

 

[eorill]

Re: Mac Purchase ?? Isabel802

I couldn't agree more. In as much as Mac poses some of its advantages as well, there are just a lot of things that are different with Windows and chances are, like what happened to me, you are looking at installing a boot camp just so you could accommodate Winodws on your machine. And when that happens, you sort of defeats the purpose of going the fruity way in the first place.