Guest Posted September 28, 2015 Share Posted September 28, 2015 Just wondering what people are using as an app for excel sheets on OSX. Main office work will still be PC based but would like the option for the new mac..... I've seen Numbers, any other cheap but good options. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
IanGibson Posted September 28, 2015 Share Posted September 28, 2015 I've used Google Sheets and Open Office. Of the two I found Google Sheets to be more stable. It was on an 8 year old MacBook though, so things may have changed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SFL Posted September 28, 2015 Share Posted September 28, 2015 If you want an office suite for Mac, just have a look at LibreOffice which is free and compatible with MS Office. They have their own file extensions, but you can save the docs in MS file extensions. In other words, you can open MS docs (word, excel, powerpoint, database, etc) in LibreOffice, edit and save in MS formats. I use them. The interfaces are different but I am sure you will get used to them quickly. Sung Edit: Or alternatively, you can purchase 'Parallels Desktop for Mac', on which you can actually runs PS programmes. I also use this but mainly to run PC based accounting softwares. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
David Hewison Posted September 28, 2015 Share Posted September 28, 2015 I'd just use the online version of Excel - just save your file to OneDrive on yoru Windows PC, and you can open it in the web version of Excel on the mac for free. Alternatively, you can buy a subscription to Office 365 for $12 a month.. mac is supported... https://products.office.com/en-AU/compare-microsoft-office-products Otherwise, there's a few open source (Free but exceptionally good) products out there such as Libre Office.. it's almost as good as office and a nice piece of software actually... Mac version: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-fresh/?type=mac-x86_64&version=5.0&lang=en-US Info: https://www.libreoffice.org/ Hope this helps Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MDM Posted September 28, 2015 Share Posted September 28, 2015 You can buy a perpetual license version of Office for Mac 2016 for £119.99 which includes Excel, Word and PowerPoint. For a busy man like yourself, time is money and you would rack up a few hours learning Numbers or anything else. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted September 28, 2015 Share Posted September 28, 2015 You can buy a perpetual license version of Office for Mac 2016 for £119.99 which includes Excel, Word and PowerPoint. For a busy man like yourself, time is money and you would rack up a few hours learning Numbers or anything else. Thanks, I have that for the PC (excellent value IMO) but just wanted a quick and easy app for the Mac - I'll still be using the PC for the office work, Mr Gates did get some things right!! Basically I just need to be able to read/write to excel but not do much else. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DHill Posted September 28, 2015 Share Posted September 28, 2015 You can buy a perpetual license version of Office for Mac 2016 for £119.99 which includes Excel, Word and PowerPoint. For a busy man like yourself, time is money and you would rack up a few hours learning Numbers or anything else. Thanks, I have that for the PC (excellent value IMO) but just wanted a quick and easy app for the Mac - I'll still be using the PC for the office work, Mr Gates did get some things right!! Basically I just need to be able to read/write to excel but not do much else. Libre Office (which seems to be some kind of successor to Open Office) will do that just fine, at no cost. If you use some of the newer formatting options (colour, etc) in Excel itself, there may be some warning messages when you save changes but that doesn't cause problems. I use Libre Office on my laptop all the time to edit files created with Excel on my desktop. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MDM Posted September 28, 2015 Share Posted September 28, 2015 You can buy a perpetual license version of Office for Mac 2016 for £119.99 which includes Excel, Word and PowerPoint. For a busy man like yourself, time is money and you would rack up a few hours learning Numbers or anything else. Thanks, I have that for the PC (excellent value IMO) but just wanted a quick and easy app for the Mac - I'll still be using the PC for the office work, Mr Gates did get some things right!! Basically I just need to be able to read/write to excel but not do much else. Numbers will do that just fine as well and comes free with the Mac (or it did last year when I bought a new Mac) so you may not need to bother with Libre Office. It certainly handles formatting of existing Excel spreadsheets and exports correctly. When I went back to the Mac several years ago, I continued to use Windows (installed on a separate partition on the Mac) for a while but eventually found myself moving everything over to the Mac. Running two different OSs can become tedious. I guess it depends on what other Windows-specific software one has. The only program I really missed was MS Access as I had invested quite a bit of time in creating my own databases. FIlemaker Pro does the job although I hardly use it any more. Lightroom handles most of my DAM requirements. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
M.Chapman Posted September 28, 2015 Share Posted September 28, 2015 Another vote for Libre Office. I've been surprised just how compatible it is with my Excel .xls and .xlsm worksheets. Even ones with complex multi-series multi format graphs and embedded VBA seem to open fine in Libre Office Calc. It's free and pretty easy to use, so doesn't take long to adapt to. Unfortunately the same can't be said for the LibreOffice equivalent of Word, which really seems to struggle with complex .docx Word documents with bulleted lists and embedded figures with captions. It makes a right mess of them. I'm going to have to try saving in open document format from Word (instead of docx) to see if it helps. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brian Yarvin Posted September 28, 2015 Share Posted September 28, 2015 Libre Office isn't a successor to Open Office, it was created when Open Office split in two. The other branch, Apache Open Office, is also a free and excellent choice. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
M.Chapman Posted September 29, 2015 Share Posted September 29, 2015 Libre Office isn't a successor to Open Office, it was created when Open Office split in two. The other branch, Apache Open Office, is also a free and excellent choice. Thanks for the info I wasn't aware of that variant, I might give it a try, although I note Wikipedia on Apache Office says. In January 2015 the project reported a lack of active developers and code contributions and that they were "still struggling in involving new volunteers who can independently work on big developments".[9] The current download contains a serious security vulnerability in the import filter from a Hangul-language Korean word processor, known since April 2015.[10] I've no idea whether it's true or not, and how LibreOffice stands in comparison. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Armstrong Posted September 29, 2015 Share Posted September 29, 2015 I use Google Docs so the document is available on whatever platform I'm using. If not that and you don't want to get Excel I would suggest Numbers. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Colin Woods Posted September 29, 2015 Share Posted September 29, 2015 I use Open Office. I tried Numbers but as I do so little Excel work these days I couldn't waste the time learning a new piece of software. Open Office works pretty much like Excel, so I can do everything I need as all the functions are where I expect them to be from Excel. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted September 29, 2015 Share Posted September 29, 2015 Thanks for the replies, after a morning of working with the iMac...it's going back........ so Numbers (which did work well enough) is the answer to a question that won't be asked for a while. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MDM Posted September 29, 2015 Share Posted September 29, 2015 May I ask why is the Mac going back? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted September 29, 2015 Share Posted September 29, 2015 May I ask why is the Mac going back? The screen mainly, not that impressed. The video card is no good for CGI - I was pretty sure it supported CUDA but got that wrong. Also a number of small issues in LR/PS workflow just makes it a bit of a pain to work with. Just had to hi res a client job this morning and it just doesn't flow as I would have expected...... and to cap it all off...my Wacom doesn't owrk as well on the Mac...that alone is grounds for a return!!! Great machines, just not for me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MDM Posted September 29, 2015 Share Posted September 29, 2015 May I ask why is the Mac going back? The screen mainly, not that impressed. The video card is no good for CGI - I was pretty sure it supported CUDA but got that wrong. Also a number of small issues in LR/PS workflow just makes it a bit of a pain to work with. Just had to hi res a client job this morning and it just doesn't flow as I would have expected...... and to cap it all off...my Wacom doesn't owrk as well on the Mac...that alone is grounds for a return!!! Great machines, just not for me. Yes you would probably need to be thinking MacPro for CGI and probably a high-end one at that which would be very costly. My needs are simpler as are those of most of us Mac users here. I've had trouble-free computing, including 5 OS upgrades, ever since I went back to the Mac. Looking at that Windows thread, I'm not sorry I did. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted September 30, 2015 Share Posted September 30, 2015 May I ask why is the Mac going back? The screen mainly, not that impressed. The video card is no good for CGI - I was pretty sure it supported CUDA but got that wrong. Also a number of small issues in LR/PS workflow just makes it a bit of a pain to work with. Just had to hi res a client job this morning and it just doesn't flow as I would have expected...... and to cap it all off...my Wacom doesn't owrk as well on the Mac...that alone is grounds for a return!!! Great machines, just not for me. Yes you would probably need to be thinking MacPro for CGI and probably a high-end one at that which would be very costly. My needs are simpler as are those of most of us Mac users here. I've had trouble-free computing, including 5 OS upgrades, ever since I went back to the Mac. Looking at that Windows thread, I'm not sorry I did. Sadly Apple in their wisdom made the Mac Pro pretty useless for the most efficient rendering by putting Fire Pro cards in the new mac Pro...... option for CUDA rendering was very limited and without CUDA you are looking at much slower work. It's annoying as a pro was the machine I wanted so I had no screen issues. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Robert Brook Posted September 30, 2015 Share Posted September 30, 2015 There is a school of thought that puts Linux ahead of Windows with regard to rendering speeds using CUDA. You would still need to use Windows in a virtual machine for Photoshop. That's assuming the problem is the current dog's breakfast of an operating system that Windows has become. I'm thinking of going down that route, but in the meantime am sticking with Widows 7. http://www.howtogeek.com/133515/4-ways-to-run-windows-software-on-linux/ http://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/6_5/rel/docs/CUDA_Getting_Started_Linux.pdf Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Marianne Posted September 30, 2015 Share Posted September 30, 2015 Numbers comes with the newest MAC OS and doesn't cost anything - and you can export any Numbers file to Excel, work on it on your PC and then open the Excel file in Numbers again on your MAC. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sunshine Superman Posted September 30, 2015 Share Posted September 30, 2015 I echo the thought that Numbers works quite well and exports to the Excel format. The price is right too. If you decide on a 3rd party app you might want to check its compatibility with Mac's latest OS: OS 10.11, El Capitan. Don't automatically assume that the current version of Office or Open Office, or any other non-Apple app will work well with El Capitan. Time will tell though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sunshine Superman Posted October 2, 2015 Share Posted October 2, 2015 More on Microsoft Office and El Capitan http://www.zdnet.com/article/office-2016-apps-crash-following-os-x-10-11-el-capitan-upgrade/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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