Yeah, well, that's the key to it. It's NOT "the same program".
Excel 2008 for the Mac is a "functionally equivalent" Macintosh OS X program
written to provide the most-commonly required Excel functions on the Mac.
But it's not "the same program". Not even close
The big push in Excel 2008 was to get the new file formats and Intel
processors working "at all" on the Mac. They built on that work for Office
2011.
If we think back to when this all happened (2006, 2007 when they were making
Excel 2008) Microsoft got flat-footed three times in quick succession...
Apple came out with a new OS and a new processor at the same time as Excel
PC came out with a new file format. Microsoft's Mac Business Unit simply
ran out of time, people, and money, to do all of that in the time available.
Software Development Engineers capable of producing to the standard required
by major OEM software vendors such as Microsoft and Apple do not grow on
trees. You have to recruit from the best and brightest, and spend five
years training them. When Apple announced a new OS and a new processor, all
of a sudden there were not enough good coders in town to do the work.
This time, they've had time to find/develop ten times as many coders, and
four times as long to do the work. I think the PC users are going to be
jealous of us this time around
Cheers
Dear John, thanks for the reply. Excel is up to date here, so I'll have to
wait for the next version... It's a shame how the same program can be so
different on each platform. I was very disappointed, because 50% of the time I
work in Excel organizing large matrices.
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John McGhie, Microsoft MVP (Word, Mac Word), Consultant Technical Writer,
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