Mac and PC compatibility

[Aimee]

I work in a company with both PC's and Macintosh's. We have an Excel
spreadsheet with links to other spreadsheets in it. Both PC users and
Mac users need to be able to open the links. Right now we are running
Windows 2002, and 2000 and Mac OS 9.1 and the Mac users can open the
Excel file but can not open any links to other spreadsheets. If we
upgrade to OS X, will the Mac users be able to open the Spreadsheets,
and the Links? What about now, is there a trick to opening links in
Excel from a Mac? Please help with any information you have. Thank you
in advance.

 

[Jim Gordon]

Hi

When you make links you have to think about the file locations and the file
path names.

There are several kinds of links. Are you referring to hyperlinks? Are you
referring to cells that are linked from one workbook to another? Are there
objects (perhaps embedded graphs) that are linked?

In general, if the documents that are linked to each other are all in the
exact same folder (not a subfolder but the same exact folder) when the links
are made and the file is saved then there is a reasonably good chance the
links will work for all users.

If the workbooks are linked to other objects not in the same folder then the
entire path name is used to make the connection. Since file path names are
structurally different between Macintosh and Microsoft Windows operating
systems, the links will only work on whichever operating system was used to
create them.

-Jim Gordon
Mac MVP

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[David J. Braden]

Hi Aimee,
My friend Jim Gordon is a serious expert in cross-platform system
integration. I certainly will defer to his judgement in such matters.
But as a hard-core Excel user, I strongly encourage you to do all you
can to get rid of any and all links to other spreadsheets. I believe
this firmly up through version 11 of Excel (dunno if it is out
commercially yet). For whatever reason, it isn't a predictably reliable
setup, IMHO.

Absolutely, get up to OS-X ASAP. It is wonderful. And everything that
is happening around Office development is OS-X-centric. The folks in the
Mac biz unit of MS are doing some seriously super work; and if your
speadsheets have any stat calcs, you will do far better to latch onto
the latest versions of Office than to stick with what you are running.

Sheesh. I sound like some sort of evangelist. Believe me, I give the MS
guys serious grief, as Jim can attest. But I strongly encourage you to
get your systems up to running OS-X (for tons of reasons), and remodel
those spreadsheets to get rid of the links. For help on that end,
consider contacting our Excel newsgroups.

Regards,
Dave Braden
MVP

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