Microsoft Excel for Macintosh 2001 Upgrade

Rating:
Summary: It worked beautifully!
Review: I needed to upgrade my home computer to telecommute from work. I purchased this software to upgrade a Mac Version Excel 4.0. It worked beautifully! I can now transfer files from my computer to work with no problem, even with the work computers being PC! The features are great, all the newest shortcut buttons, and workbook options. I love it! It is absolutely wonderful!I highly recommend you upgrade to the 2001 version, no matter what format or how old your previous version of Excel

Rating:
Summary: The MS programmers forgot their Mac 101 lessons!
Review: This upgrade, from MS Excel 95 to MS Excel 2001, was pretty much a "forced" upgrade for me, thanks to the incompatibility between Excel 95 and my new G4 Titanium Powerbook and its operating system (OS 9.1 "as delivered", presently OS 9.2.2).

Like a good boy, I had been regularly purchasing my MS Excel upgrades for a very long time. How long has it been? It's been so long that my first copy of Excel (1.0, in 1985) was free, because at the time I possessed registered copies of MS Multiplan and MS Chart. That's a long time by anyone's measure. And it extends continuously over more than fifteen years, so you can appreciate that the program is fairly important for me.

With the ever-increasing hegemony of Windows-based business networks, and with the fact that Excel 95 cannot run on a G4 Mac with OS 9.0 or newer, I bit the bullet and purchased this latest upgrade. And, while I've now pretty much climbed its learning curve, the experience hasn't exactly been one that I'd rave about.

Here are a few nits I choose to pick (some small, some not so small):

* Somewhere between Excel 95 and Office 2001, Microsoft programmers seem to have lost track of the fact that Macs have both "Return" and "Enter" keys. (Wintel machines have no "Return" key.) The "Return" key no longer functions as it did, scrolling down one cell in an Excel spreadsheet; it now does precisely the same thing the "Enter" key does (which is limited to whatever one chooses from the "Preferences" menu). Dumb!

* In like fashion, the MS programmers decided to reassign several of the common "Command" key functions (Fill Down, Fill Across, Insert, Delete, Clear, etc.) to the "Control" key, again in some ill-founded effort at "cross-platform"compatibility. (Imagine my surprise when I first went to insert a row or column, only to find that my selection was formatted in italics!) In the process, the ergonomic superiority of the Mac keyboard, requiring less "stretch" effort to activate these keyboard shortcuts, has now been sacrificed to the Bill Gates God of Uniformity.

* After all these years, Microsoft STILL continues to place the Font menu on its own (non-standard) toolbar, not as a Mac-standard menu. Dumb!

* While tools have been added to the toolbox library, the ability to customize toolbars for one's own use has actually been reduced! And the tools don't always load consistently, suggesting some bugginess that requires a Microsoft patch or two, not yet available. And, unlike previous Excel upgrades in my experience, this one appears to provide no additional chart types. Dumb!

* Microsoft appears to use window definitions not in agreement with Apple system standards and requirements. I use Action GoMac (reviewed elsewhere at Amazon) as a navigation utility; it places a toolbar/launch dock at the bottom of the screen (much as Windows does). Excel 2001 fails to recognize this (small) reduction in useable screen height; the default Excel 2001 window spills over into this bottom-screen region. Frustrating!

There are a few (very few, I'm sad to say) gains:

* The application runs acceptably fast. But I think this has as much or more to do with G4 speed and available RAM as it does to "tight" coding by software engineers.

* I've got the cross-platform compatibility that my business-related activities require.

Summary: A "forced" upgrade for G4 Mac users who must use Excel. More steps backward than forward for those of us who prefer Macs but need the cross-platform compatibility. At best, three stars, and then only with the greatest of reluctance.