Is it worth buying office 2008 for excel?

[me1405]

I recently bought a Mac (for the first time, I am new to the whole Mac
experience!) and bought iWork, thinking it would be fine for all my needs. I
am a final year student currently trying to write my dissertation which
includes creating charts/graphs with huge (1000 cells+) datasets. Having
tried this in Numbers and getting nowhere, I am now considering buying Office
2008 for the Mac so that I can use Excel. I have however read some bad
reviews about Excel 08 also being slow. But will it be a lot faster than
Numbers? Numbers is taking absolutely ages to produce a graph of a few 1000
cells when on my HP laptop on Windows using Excel 03 it only takes a few
seconds!! Do I buy office (excel) 2008 for my Mac?!

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

I recently bought a Mac (for the first time, I am new to the whole Mac
experience!) and bought iWork, thinking it would be fine for all my needs. I
am a final year student currently trying to write my dissertation which
includes creating charts/graphs with huge (1000 cells+) datasets. Having
tried this in Numbers and getting nowhere, I am now considering buying Office
2008 for the Mac so that I can use Excel. I have however read some bad
reviews about Excel 08 also being slow. But will it be a lot faster than
Numbers? Numbers is taking absolutely ages to produce a graph of a few 1000
cells when on my HP laptop on Windows using Excel 03 it only takes a few
seconds!! Do I buy office (excel) 2008 for my Mac?!

Hi,

Without using your specific data set it's hard to say which application
is fastest.

Why not try it on several computers? Also, you could compare it with
NeoOffice.

If you post back I bet the rest of us would find your test results to be
useful.

Thanks.

-Jim

--
Jim Gordon
Mac MVP


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[Zach Heaton]

I recently bought a Mac (for the first time, I am new to the whole Mac
experience!) and bought iWork, thinking it would be fine for all my
needs. I am a final year student currently trying to write my
dissertation which includes creating charts/graphs with huge (1000
cells+) datasets. Having tried this in Numbers and getting nowhere, I
am now considering buying Office 2008 for the Mac so that I can use
Excel. I have however read some bad reviews about Excel 08 also being
slow. But will it be a lot faster than Numbers? Numbers is taking
absolutely ages to produce a graph of a few 1000 cells when on my HP
laptop on Windows using Excel 03 it only takes a few seconds!! Do I
buy office (excel) 2008 for my Mac?!

Personally, I wouldn't buy Excel just for graphing, especially if your
goal is specifically to graph large amounts of data for a dissertation.

I'd suggest trying one of the free or open-source graphic programs
available for Mac. The simplest option is probably Plot
<http://plot.micw.eu/Doc/Plot> - it's free, Macintosh native, and does
*very* well with plotting extremely large datasets. It also has
somewhat more flexibility in plot design than Excel, which may be useful
if you're working on a dissertation.

You could also try R <http://www.r-project.org/>, which is designed
primarily for statistical analysis, but which also has plotting
capabilities. This is probably a better option if you need to do
advanced data manipulation in addition to plotting.

If you're more familiar with UNIX, I'd take a look at the MacPorts
project <http://www.macports.org/>, which allows you to install UNIX
software on Macintosh. (Another option is Fink
<http://www.finkproject.org/>, but I haven't used them recently.) Using
Macports, you can install standard UNIX plotting packages such asnuplot
and Grace.

Regards,
Zach Heaton