Excel on Windows through VM/BC

[needmacair]

Hello,

I am a first time forum user and I am not sure if I am posting the question on the right place- apologize if this isn't the right place.

I will be starting PhD in Financial Economics in a month and looking forward to purchase a good ultrabook. I would buy Macbook Air in a second if it weren't for one thing- Microsoft Excel. I use Excel heavily for modeling and cannot live without it. I especially need Excel for data cleaning for my dissertation work and research. I initially planned to buy Asus Zenbook (4GB ram; 8GB ram version is not available in my country) but the reviews are not that great. The alternative that I have is to buy Macbook Air 4GB/256GB model (again, 8GB model is not available in my country but I can live with 4GB since I do not intend to run heavy models in my laptop anyway).

My question is whether the MacBook keyboard is compatible with the Excel shortcuts provided I use windows on Mac. For instance, I would use Alt-H-S-U to open the sort option on a PC. Does this shortcut work on MacBook if I use Excel in Windows environment that runs through VirtualBox or BootCamp?

Thank you.

 

[Freyqq]

Hello,

I am a first time forum user and I am not sure if I am posting the question on the right place- apologize if this isn't the right place.

I will be starting PhD in Financial Economics in a month and looking forward to purchase a good ultrabook. I would buy Macbook Air in a second if it weren't for one thing- Microsoft Excel. I use Excel heavily for modeling and cannot live without it. I especially need Excel for data cleaning for my dissertation work and research. I initially planned to buy Asus Zenbook (4GB ram; 8GB ram version is not available in my country) but the reviews are not that great. The alternative that I have is to buy Macbook Air 4GB/256GB model (again, 8GB model is not available in my country but I can live with 4GB since I do not intend to run heavy models in my laptop anyway).

My question is whether the MacBook keyboard is compatible with the Excel shortcuts provided I use windows on Mac. For instance, I would use Alt-H-S-U to open the sort option on a PC. Does this shortcut work on MacBook if I use Excel in Windows environment that runs through VirtualBox or BootCamp?

Thank you.

Yes, it will work. Virtualbox is the best route for excel, so you can use OSX at the same time. I use virtualbox as well for excel. If you only have 4gb of ram total, I'd assign Windows 10 about 1 to 1.5gb of it.

 

[needmacair]

Thanks for the reply. Do you think Excel will be fine with boot camp?

Also I'm reading good reviews about Office 2016 for Mac. Anybody here has experiences with it? I am hoping that Office 2016 will be same as Office 2013 for windows. If that is the case then I don't need to install windows at all in the first place.

 

[theSeb]

Thanks for the reply. Do you think Excel will be fine with boot camp?

Also I'm reading good reviews about Office 2016 for Mac. Anybody here has experiences with it? I am hoping that Office 2016 will be same as Office 2013 for windows. If that is the case then I don't need to install windows at all in the first place.

Yes, it's fine. Windows running in Bootcamp is just like Windows running on other PC hardware, for the most part. Excel behaves exactly like you would expect it to.

 

[macenied]

Hello,

I am a first time forum user and I am not sure if I am posting the question on the right place- apologize if this isn't the right place.

I will be starting PhD in Financial Economics in a month and looking forward to purchase a good ultrabook. I would buy Macbook Air in a second if it weren't for one thing- Microsoft Excel. I use Excel heavily for modeling and cannot live without it. I especially need Excel for data cleaning for my dissertation work and research. I initially planned to buy Asus Zenbook (4GB ram; 8GB ram version is not available in my country) but the reviews are not that great. The alternative that I have is to buy Macbook Air 4GB/256GB model (again, 8GB model is not available in my country but I can live with 4GB since I do not intend to run heavy models in my laptop anyway).

My question is whether the MacBook keyboard is compatible with the Excel shortcuts provided I use windows on Mac. For instance, I would use Alt-H-S-U to open the sort option on a PC. Does this shortcut work on MacBook if I use Excel in Windows environment that runs through VirtualBox or BootCamp?

Thank you.

Just be aware that a MacBook keyboard is not a full keyboard you might be used to. Some keys are simply missing. However, you can emulate them with key combinations.