Wednesday, June 18, 2008

I hate the new version of Excel.

Has anyone tried the new Office 2008 for Mac? Specifically, Excel?

Because I have. And I hate it. Detest. Curse it with every breath.

Scientists must be some sort of sizeable market for graphing. Even the ones who use macs!

Can anyone save me with their suggestions of killer graphing apps for Mac? I would consider installing Windows on my poor lil' Macbook Pro if required, though that is basically sleeping with the devil to get rid of herpes. Or something like that.

Who knows? If you can recommend something that is perfect, there may even be prizes? Of chocolate?

Infiniflux, out!

Joel

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Aw I actually kind of like it! Load times suck ASS on my Macbook (for all of Office), and the default formatting for graphs on Excel is still hideous, but other than that I don't mind it.

Forgive the flamebait, but what exactly bugs you about it? Honestly I don't use it that much.

Joel Kelly said...

i agree, the load times are hella slow for incredibly simple tasks (such as trying to fix the hideous formatting). my computer can handle photoshop- why not a relatively simple spreadsheet/graphing program?

the previous version of office for mac had its flaws, but it had been around enough that i knew my way around it. i don't see the advantage they gained in changing a lot of the features.

we use it in our group to prepare figures for publications, and that sucks, big time. part of the problem is that i just don't know what else is out there that could compete for scientific graphing on the mac. Numbers, Apple's offering for spreadsheets, is targeted towards all those liberal arts hippies who use their laptops to write English papers.

Jons said...

to distinguish myself as an utter freakin nerd: I always used R on my mac. Its more for hardcore stats, but the graphs are pretty.

It is to excel what latex is to word though...

Joel Kelly said...

I tried R a while back, but was intimidated. I bow down to ye, master of the command line!