MS EXCEL Battle

Ok, so I'm making the switch to 27" iMac for my home desktop. My frustration has been that I live inside MS EXCEL/WORD/ACCESS/POWERPOINT for work purposes. Other than that, I possess no need for a windows machine and love mac. (BTW: I hate MS WORD/EXCEL on mac)

My question: Should I dual boot my new iMac or just run Parrallels or VMWare when I need to use the MS Suite. Is a dual boot machine really necessary?

Also, would I be able to have a backup wireless WINDOWS KEYBOARD for when I use excel since I navigate excel with the windows key and all keystrokes that I've learned throughout the years. Can someone offer me the best solution for frustration to switch.

Thanks.

I would just run it in a virtual machine - no question. VMware Fusion 4 is great.

Run VMware or Parallels with Windows 7 in it and install your Win version of Office. It will not work any differently than if you used a Windows machine. Dual booting for something as simple as Office is overkill.

There is hardly ANY noticeable difference anymore between Office 2010 (Win) and Office 2011 (Mac) when it comes to Word/Excel/Outlook/Powerpoint.

Deckyon said:

There is hardly ANY noticeable difference anymore between Office 2010 (Win) and Office 2011 (Mac) when it comes to Word/Excel/Outlook/Powerpoint.

Click to expand...

I don't really agree with this. I know where the OP is coming from - especially if you're used to navigating with the keyboard. Even something as simple as inserting lines or columns isn't the same. There are definite differences in behavior with Excel at least. If you're a real power user of Excel - I can definitely understand wanting to use the Windows version.

Relearning the shortcuts doesnt count as a difference - that will help across all applications.

Yes, I am a power user of Excel and have been for years (**** pivot tables until my eyes bug out and the coding - I wish I could pass the work off, but I cannot, yet.) Once I switched and learned the shortcuts again, I am just as fast as I was in Windows.

That's not my point. If it was just differences in shortcuts - that wouldn't warrant mentioning - there are distinct differences in behavior - which I found annoying and cumbersome and I wasn't even doing anything that exotic. I ran into distinct differences just making tables for the benchmarks thread. There are real behavioral differences. If you don't run into them - it won't bother you - but I can understand those who say it does. There's a lot more to Excel than just pivot tables and I'm not talking about programming macro functions. I don't work from home, and even if I did, I don't spend that much time these days creating complicated spreadsheets - so who knows - maybe there's workarounds for everything - but even smart tables don't work the way they should, which I found annoying. I think some of the analysis toolpaks are different - especially if you need to do real statistical analysis. Not to mention external add-in packages like Crystal Ball won't work. Like I said - it just depends on how you use Excel - it can be used for a lot more than just data sorting and accounting, but I noticed nuance differences even with simple activities.

But - as long as I have you here - what's the keyboard shortcut for inserting columns or rows? I couldn't seem to find that the last time I used it at home.

Runnig excel (ms office) 2008, updated to 12.3.2, I get text converted into xxxxx.
when you click on them they tempoarily turm into words again. Very awkward!
copying the text to texteditor, converting it to plain text and pasting it back into excel doesn't work.

found solution: don't make it up as "text": but as "general"