Animus77
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Q: MS Excel 2003 compatibility to iMac

I am considering purchase of a new iMac to replace my old Dell XPS workstation. I have a number of Excel macro programs that were built on Office 2003 and are now running in Excel compatibility mode on Office 2010 on my PC.  I need to know if these macro programs will work on MS Office for iMac. The expense in rebuilding all the programs would be prohibitive in time and money

Posted on May 21, 2015 6:33 AM

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Animus77

Q: MS Excel 2003 compatibility to iMac

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  • by Allan Jones,

    Allan Jones Allan Jones May 21, 2015 7:59 AM in response to Animus77
    Level 8 (35,176 points)
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    May 21, 2015 7:59 AM in response to Animus77

    In their infinite wisdom, MS elected to deprecate macro support in later version for Office:Mac. Your best chances of success are with the latest version of Office for Mac---2011. Before spending money, I'd try a free option--LibreOffice. It may actually be better at handling macros thatn the Mac versions of Office.

     

    http://www.libreoffice.org/discover/libreoffice/

     

    With a new computer you can use the included Boot Camp utiltiy to partition part fo your hard drive and install Windows and Office 2010 for PC. You have to reboot the computer into Windows to use it, and you need a large enough hardrive/SSD creat a minimum 120GB partition for Windows.

     

    You can also use an emulation program like Parallels of VM FusionWare. It runs Windows like it were an app. However emulation is slower than using Boot Camp to create a native installation. The advantage to an emulator is you don't have to reboot to get to Windows.

     

    The expense in rebuilding all the programs would be prohibitive in time and money


    With that consideration, I think Boot Camp or an emulator are the best actions to avoid having the files potentially mangled becasue MS made a bad decision.