Attack of the Mac!

By Nick Crawley on September 23 2009

Modelling issue on a Mac (again)

There are plenty of people looking at the pro’s and con’s of modelling on an Apple Mac at the moment so I won’t write a thesis on the matter but thought I would share with you a question that was aked of me earlier today.

Over the years I have seen many people try to use a Mac for modelling, on training courses, project developers using their home pc when travelling. I should be up front, regular readers know I am, ironically, not a fan of Excel (especially 2007) but using a Mac is not a great alternative for professional financial modelling.

Now I am a Mac user at home, for those applications where smooth edges, glossy screens and nice buttons make the experience significantly better, such as photo editing, music, web surfing etc the Mac is a hundred years in the future! Modelling doesn’t benefit from these things… The best analogy I can give is the iPhone, great for social communications but useless for the demands of a modern executive if you have ever been on the same continent as a blackberry user you will have seen this yourself!

How do I run a spreadsheet on a Mac.

Being a fan of ‘the right tool for the job’ I think Excel and iWorks are over-engineered for my simple home budgets and general calculations away from the demands of the office and so I use Google Documents. The way I access spreadsheet calculations on a Mac when needed is to go: Safari / igoogle / Documents / Spreadsheet

How to calculate in Excel on a Mac when running a Windows OS.

Recently a reader called me to ask how to ‘calculate’ in Excel, running a windows operating system on a Mac laptop. The issue was …where is the F9 button! Good point. I am sure there are better ways but my suggestion was to

create a macro which has the single line of code ‘calculate’ or even maybe ‘calculate.full’.
with assigned keys for example SHIFT+ALT+C (or whatever keys are easy to access / remember on a Mac layout)

I would be interested to know if there is a better way, remember this was a Mac running a windows OS not the usual Mac OS with Excel for Mac.

Here are a few useful links if you want to read more:

Here is one from Wall St Training.
There is this family website which is pretty good and is worth a read
This forum is also worth a read if you are stuck on this matter.
I could resist it, PHD has done another good job with iWorks (nothing to do with keyboard shortcuts)