I'm a mac user and I use excel a lot, help

2 points·kenjisano··7 comments

Hi!

I have to use excel a lot for work and for school, the only problem is that I'm a mac user! Numbers ( the excel version for mac) lacks of formulas, microsoft office for mac sucks big time, i had 2003 and 2008 and both of them suck! and yesterday I read 33 developers left openoffice.

I guess microsoft won and I will have to get a netbook with windows just to use excel only, or what would you do?

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Use LibreOffice ( http://www.documentfoundation.org/download/ ) or just use Windows. You could emulate Windows with VirtualBox/VMWare Fusion, but it is slow as hell. You can also get a lower end laptop ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1841462 ) that is bigger and more powerful than a netbook for the price of a netbook. I'd only use a netbook if you want something smaller.

Office 2011 just came out in the last month and restores support for VBA and much else.

You could always run XP in VMware and use the Windows version of Excel.

VirtualBox is free. I would start with that.

* Numbers ( the excel version for mac) lacks of formulas, microsoft office for mac sucks big time, i had 2003 and 2008 and both of them suck!*

I thought Numbers was Apple's thing? Did MS stop doing Office on Mac?

I don't know how good the new Office for Mac is. It does look a lot better and early feedback has been positive. Having said that I run Windows 7 on a VM for one and only one reason, Excel.

Virtualize XP and run Office in that. Performance is great in VMWare Fusion. It's the best way to use Excel on the Mac.

Does Gnumeric meet your needs? http://projects.gnome.org/gnumeric/ OSX: http://gnumeric.darwinports.com/

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