Office/Excel on ibook compatibility w/a pc...

[popeyek1]

Specifically excel. I have a conference to go to in May and need to get
a notebook by then. Virtually everyone will be using pc notebooks there
and I will have assingments to use on excel. We will ge the assingments
on cd. Will I be able to use an ibook with office and excel and if so
do I have to step up and buy the professional edition with Virtual PC
or will the standard edition work?

 

[Clive Huggan]

Hello Popeye,

The file structure of Excel on the PC and the Mac is identical, with only
minor variations in features. You can feed the CD into the slot on your
iBook, transfer the file to the hard drive and work on it exactly as your
PC-loving colleagues will. There is no need to use Virtual PC.

Ditto with Word...

Why not try it out with Excel files from a PC before you go, so you can be
confident?

Give my regards to Olive -- she's a fine slip of a girl!


Cheers,

Clive Huggan
Canberra, Australia
(My time zone is at least 5 hours different from the US and Europe, so my
follow-on responses to those regions can be delayed)
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[Daiya Mitchell]

For the most part, files are completely compatible, as Clive says. I think
some advanced business students have run into problems because there might
be certain business add-ins for excel that aren't made for the Mac, and I'm
not sure what the workarounds are there. What kind of conference is it? Do
you know what sort of stuff they will ask you to do?

You should probably ask in the excel newsgroup, with more detail about what
you need to do. Actually, you should probably email the conference
organizers and ask them.

Also, note that if you bought Office Pro with Virtual PC, you would still
need to buy WinOffice to install into the virtual machine, plus you would
want extra memory because VPC takes a lot.

 

[popeyek1]

Thanks both to Clif and Daiya. It's a business conference and we will
be working with a lot of financial statements and forcast spredsheets.
I'm sure if I call ahead and ask they will poo poo my mac and tell me
to bring a pc machine. I don't have a notebook now and figure if I have
to buy one for this conference I'll spend $1700 instead of $1K and get
an ibook instead of a dell.

Hal Perez
Balitmore, MD

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Hi Hal,

They better not poo-poo Mac Excel 2004. It's calculations, particularly
with certain statistic functions, are more accurate than Windows Excel.
Plus with Mac Excel you can add transparency to graphs. Windows Excel
can display them, but only Macs can create them.

-Jim