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captsalmon

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 20, 2009
2
0
I switched to Mac last month, coming from a PC Excel paradigm, and I am finding that most of the demanding tasks that I could do with PC Excel simply cause Mac Excel to crash. Like copy and paste a column with 10,000 cell simply locks up Mac Excel. Even saving a speadsheet with a lot (10,000) cells with formulas will cause it to freeze. This type of stuff I did all the time on the PC, so I am just looking to see if this is a fundamental flaw with Mac Excel. I haven't seem much discussion, which seems weird if it is a major flow.
 
I switched to Mac last month, coming from a PC Excel paradigm, and I am finding that most of the demanding tasks that I could do with PC Excel simply cause Mac Excel to crash. Like copy and paste a column with 10,000 cell simply locks up Mac Excel. Even saving a speadsheet with a lot (10,000) cells with formulas will cause it to freeze. This type of stuff I did all the time on the PC, so I am just looking to see if this is a fundamental flaw with Mac Excel. I haven't seem much discussion, which seems weird if it is a major flow.

I know many will defend the Mac Excel... and others will not. Still others will offer you "solutions" from open source projects. All these opinions are going to likely fly your way within an hour or so. :D

I will say though I hate the Mac version of excel. I remember several weeks back driving to my office on a weekend to use my PC when I had a perfectly "good" copy of Excel for Mac sitting on my laptop. I hate it that much. :D

I now FINALLY upgraded to a Intel Mac a couple weeks back and just run Vmware Fusion and run the Windows Office products. It's really SAD that Excel for Windows loads up considerably faster than the native Mac version does... not to mention it's more stable and just all around works better. Particularly for larger operations. :)

Mike
 
So, it sounds like there is some disagreement. I've even gone back to my 4 year old PC 'craptop' and can drag, copy, paste, whatever thousands of cells, but, again, it just don't work in 2008 Excel on a Mac that is brand new (OS X 10.6.2). And I know all about Openoffice.org (pretty impressed) but I need to get some work done during the transition, but simply can't get it done with 2008 Mac Excel.

more comment?
 
I've certainly had some beachballs with Mac Excel '08 but never (that I can recall) all out freezes... Recently I copied a handfull of cells and pasted them to a full column accidentally. Of course, I had made a ton of other changes and didn't save in the meantime. Excel went away for 5-6 mins and eventually came back. I was worried.

Overall with Mac Excel. I use it daily -- I think it's adequate, I don't think it's good. I do have VMWare loaded with PC Office just in case (like for the picture import to Word crash after the previous update).
 
Make sure you're up-to-date with your Office 2008 patches. We've put in a lot of effort into improving performance in Excel. The latest and greatest is, as of this writing, 12.2.3.

To check your version, open the Excel menu and select "About Excel". If you're not on 12.2.3, you can update by going to the Help menu and selecting "Check for Updates".

Regards,
Nadyne.
 
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