Mac or PC? I still need both…

I know I am not alone in knowing that I need both a Mac and a PC to do the things I want to. I appreciate that most web designers will run VMWare Fusion, Parallels or some other PC operating system emulator so that they can test web sites in Windows and especially in Internet Explorer. For me though it goes a bit deeper.

I love my Mac, it works brilliantly, displays everything in crystal clear colours and has some amazing software to make my life a lot easier (Coda & Things especially). However the one thing that it doesn’t do so well is the exact thing that my PC does so well, Microsoft Excel!!! I spend a lot of time in Excel designing reports and performing analysis and I love it. The thing is, the Mac version of Excel is like going back in time 10 years and is just so awkward to use. It’s like everything that Microsoft changed when they moved from Excel 2003 to Excel 2007 on the PC was ignored when they developed Excel 2008 on the Mac. I am hopeful of a lot better version in the future as although I don’t mind running VMWare Fusion for my testing I would prefer to have a nice version of Excel on my Mac. Will it happen? Who knows, so until then it’s a Mac/PC combo all the way…