Needless to say, I want to do this without buying Office for Mac. Microsoft has viewers for excel for PC’s. Is there any such free download for Mac, or any program that will let me view excel documents?
forgive my ignorance of all things Mac, but if it is running OS X, try OpenOffice.org
You might also try icExcel. I can’t personally vouch for it, but it looks promising.
I have NeoOfficeJ which I just used to open and view the excel files and it worked just fine. Although my wife has this Mac, I am a PC person. Can someone advise me as to how to make NeoOffice the default program for opening all attachments. Right now I have to open the program and go through a couple of steps. No big deal, but it would be easier if it was my default viewer.
Select an xls document. Do a Command-I (for “Get Info”). Hit the dropdown box where it says “Open With”. Select NeoOfficeJ. Then click the button to make it the default app for ALL documents of this type.
With Mac OSX, the default action for a file depends on the extension, just like Windows. Earlier OS’s used type and creator information from the resource fork of the file, but with a Unix base, that’s not applicable anymore.
Use Get Info.
[ul]
[li]Click once on a file of the type you want to set. [/li][li]Choose Get Info from the file menu. In the window that opens, there is a section for default application. [/li][li]Open that by clicking on the triangle. [/li][li]Using the “select application” button, browse the applications to find the one you want to use. [/li][/ul]
If you check the box that says use this as default for all files of this type, in future, double clicking or using the open button in your e-mail program will use the application for those types of files.
Cheers,
Kiwi Fruit
Untrue, totally untrue. If you create a document with Microsoft Excel and you save it as “filename.doc” and quit out of Excel, and then double-click the file, it’s going to open in Excel. Because the file still has file type and creator codes, just as Excel files did under MacOS 9 (8, 7, 6, etc). See?
And the file type and creator codes will override what the OS does with a file based on its file extension.
MacOS X drives are formatted HFS+, same as MacOS 8 and 9; HFS+ fully supports resource forks as well as data forks, and they 're still very much in use.
All that’s changes is that it is now entirely possible to have a MacOS X application with no resource fork (using the modern .app bundle to contain what would formerly have been resources as separate mini-files) and which saves documents without file types and creator codes, using only the file extension to identify the file type to the operating system. (Mac operating systems have been able to deal with file extensions since System 7 but not as efficiently)
All consumer Macs (including the iMac G5) ship with Appleworks 6 which, although slightly antiquated, should be able to read and write Excel and Word Docs.
OB