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If you need to use Excel at work, you need x86 since Excel for Mac is a gutted toy (MS wants your company yo buy / subscribe to windows too).

And google sheets in my opinion is not good for complicated stuff - the constant lag..



I would bet 95%+ of people who use Excel are not affected by any difference between Excel for macOS versus Windows.


I work in a large enterprise company, have both windows and mac machines, and excel works equally great in both, but more and more excel runs in a browser.

We mostly email links to spreadsheets running in cloud. So it really doesn't matter what your OS is any more from an excel perspective, as long as your computer can run a modern browser you are good.


Excel in browser is unreaponsive, laggy and unproductive for power users.

It is like a toy version of the standalone app.

Also it sucks with lists, pivot tables...


From what I've seen your company is an exception. Yes, for 95% of users, browser/Mac Excel is more than enough. But the non-tech companies I've seen still don't want to get Macs because of that 5%, they just don't want to bother with having to support two platforms. And leadership obviously doesn't care/have no idea.


95% of people who use Photoshop would probably be served just fine by Krita, or even GIMP if they learned the somewhat wonky UI, and would save a ton of money in the process. However, people usually want to use the "standard" because of some vague fear that the alternative isn't 100.00% compatible, or that it won't have some obscure feature that they don't even know about yet, etc. I think Excel is exactly like this today, and so is Word. There are many alternatives that are just as good (and much cheaper) for 99% of users, but people still want to stick with "the standard" instead of taking a small risk on something different.

Maybe in the coming Great Depression of 2025, people will think differently and start looking at cheaper alternatives.


I was disputing this claim:

> If you need to use Excel at work, you need x86 since Excel for Mac is a gutted toy

The nominal cost of Excel was not the topic being discussed. It was the cost of using Excel for MacOS rather than Excel for Windows.

Almost no one needs the Windows specific features of Excel, so almost no one needs to give up using macOS just because of Excel.


I agree, and I think my post supports that, in a way. I'm just saying 95% of people probably could work just fine with GSheets or LibreOffice or whatever, but the very same is true for MacExcel (even more true, in fact, because it's closer to WinExcel than the alternatives).




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