Heavy Excel Users?

I got tired of using the OS X version of excel and have since created a boot camp partition. The upside of this, is its the best performance (I also have other apps I need to run which are better via native execution vs. VMs).

I agree with the majority of posts - Windows Excel runs much faster in a VM than native Mac Excel. The Mac version is tolerable on simple spreadsheets, but maddening on complex spreadsheets (the kind we mostly rely on here at work)

Another thing to consider is that if you need to run any Excel add-ons, they probably won't work on a Mac. That was the deal breaker for me.

Office 365 gives you access to both versions, and will allow you to upgrade to the expected new version of Mac Office when it's finally released.

Rewriting PC version shortcuts

I worked in banking for years and have been very very accustomed to the PC Excel shortcuts. I'd prefer to work on a Mac so I'm curious whether it's worth just rewriting PC version shortcuts.

There is the option, as I understand, to manually write custom shortcuts within Mac Excel. Has anyone just tried to re-write all the PC version shortcuts within Mac Excel? Are there limitations in doing so? The first issue I noticed was re-writing the Paste Special shortcuts. Whereas in PC Excel you can type Alt+E+S to pull up Paste Special and then various shortcuts from there (i.e. +T for Paste Special Format Only), I could only seem to go so far as to re-write Paste Special in Mac, but not the various Paste Special iterations beyond.

Any thoughts?

Hello,
To virtualize Office, what does work best in your opinion, Parallels or Fusion?

Please advise, thanks, daniele

dcaccount said:

Hello,
To virtualize Office, what does work best in your opinion, Parallels or Fusion?

Please advise, thanks, daniele

Click to expand...

Both offer trials so try both? Personally, I think Vmware Fusion is more stable and robust product. I've had stability issues with Parallels, though that was with an older version.

maflynn said:

Both offer trials so try both? Personally, I think Vmware Fusion is more stable and robust product. I've had stability issues with Parallels, though that was with an older version.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply.

I will try them both for sure.

One doubt, does Fusion allow the dock integration of the Excel, opening it as it were a Mac native application without having to open the VM and the Excel?

Thanks,
daniele

dcaccount said:

Thanks for the reply.

I will try them both for sure.

One doubt, does Fusion allow the dock integration of the Excel, opening it as it were a Mac native application without having to open the VM and the Excel?

Thanks,
daniele

Click to expand...

I don't believe their is a lot to choose between Fusion and Parallels. Parallels has today just released a new version 10, which is comparable with Yosemite. I have used Parallels for years, without any stability problems.

Parallels allows you to chose which Application files you want to open by default in Mac or Windows. I have set mine to use the OS X as the default option for MS Office files. I can't comment on Fusion as I don't use it.

dcaccount said:

Thanks for the reply.

I will try them both for sure.

One doubt, does Fusion allow the dock integration of the Excel, opening it as it were a Mac native application without having to open the VM and the Excel?

Thanks,
daniele

Click to expand...

Yes, Vmware offers that level of integration. Technically though both Parallels and Vmware start up to run the application, its just that you don't see the windows desktop. The App starts up from the dock.

maflynn said:

Yes, Vmware offers that level of integration. Technically though both Parallels and Vmware start up to run the application, its just that you don't see the windows desktop. The App starts up from the dock.

Click to expand...

Thank you so much.

Would you mind advising how to do this? I have looked up but I have not found a tutorial.

I have a VM with windows 8 installed, now I am about to install office. An then?

Thanks again, daniele

Performance

Excel for Mac is single threaded, and that alone has a huge performance impact.

Any serious excel workload within a Paralles VM will beat the native Excel@Mac. Its not even a competition.

Excel shortcuts

I've used VMWare + Excel running on WinXP and now Windows7 for years without much trouble. In general, it's stable and fast on a mid-range 2008 iMac with 6 GB of RAM. Because I'm not a heavy windows user these days (I just fire up VMWare when needed) I don't save any files to the windows environment. Instead, I save all files back to the mac side and let time machine back them up. This is actually pretty cool, because you can treat the windows environment as a "disposable shell": I keep a backup on a large external drive (the win image is about 50 GB, and changes all the time, so you'll probably want to exclude this from Time Machine) and when things go wrong on Windows (every year or so...) I just throw it in the trash and grab a copy of my backup. In a twisted way, it's actually better than windows

All that said, I use Excel 2011 daily on the Mac and, for casual use, it works great. With larger files, you will notice slower performance, but for many things, it's absolutely fine.

Excel for Mac is much slower and missing a few of the key keyboard shortcuts I use every day -like F2 to edit a cell, ALT + to total a column of numbers, etc.

Click to expand...

However, all of the shortcuts that make excel a breeze on windows are not as apparent on the Mac.

Click to expand...

The shortcuts do cause some headaches, mostly because there are so many to keep track of. However, most shortcuts do exist on both platforms, they are just sometimes different for the same action. I have a (nearly) complete side-by-side list here: https://exceljet.net/keyboard-shortcuts

[full disclosure: I created that list of shortcuts. I'm always looking to add or update, if you know of others]

I weigh about 165 lbs. but I do use Excel a lot.

Irony looking at this thread and this one on the same page today:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1773380/