Went to do a whole-workbook find-and-replace in Excel, resorted the data, and attempted to Save As (tab delimited text) under another name. The “Save As” dialog box did not reflect the new name I was typing, nor could I change to a different folder. Typed gibberish and hit the OK button. Send the text file onwards to the Oracle guru, who called shortly after to say the file was truncated at something slightly over 200 records.
Yep, time to upgrade from Excel 5.0, I guess.
I’ve been putting this off for a long time now. Anticipations of ten zillion annoying Microsoft files sprayed all across my hard drive, cluttering up my Extensions folder. Worries about talking paper clips. Concerns about the infamous Microsoft code bloat bringing my G3 300 & 256 MB to its knees. Worries about a slew of error messages caused by out-of-date stuff in my old files that won’t fly any more.
Insert the dreaded CDROM. Prepare to enter some godawful set of installation codes and wait while some damn registration daemon calls home.
MacOS 9: Quick little installer, no installation codes, no “wait while we call Redmond to see if you should be allowed to use our fabled product”. No sudden upsurge in the amount of crap on my hard drive. I double-click on an old Excel file and Excel 2001 launches with a spirited zing, opening faster than Excel 5. Perfect compatibility of my old files. A quick visit to “Preferences” kills the Mac version of the infamous talking paper clip (we get a talking Mac Plus. Dead on Arrival.). Hey, cool! How about MacOS X?
MacOS X: After rebooting into X, insert the other installation CD. Installation instrux say (loosely transliterated): To install Excel, drag Excel from this CD to your Applications folder or wherever the heck you’d like to put it, we don’t care.
?? This is Microsoft ?? I do so, taking them at their word and installing Excel X in a folder on an entirely different drive, not the MacOS X startup drive, not the Applications folder. Not even an HFS+ volume, by god, but an older HFS volume, the same folder containing the MacOS 9 version of Excel. I double-click an existing Excel document and Excel X pops right up. Nice and fast. No talking paper clips in evidence.
Reboot into MacOS 9 and double-click an Excel file and wait for Excel X to try to launch and error-message out. Nope, Excel 2001 opens. Way cool!
::plays in Excel for next couple weeks in both platform variants::
Hey Dooku, tell your buddies down the hall they did a damn good job on Excel! Congrats (even if belated ones) to the Microsoft Mac Business Unit.