Originally Posted by jyl (Post 8556505)

I use Macs at home and have Excel/Mac. I use PCs at work and pretty much live in Excel/Windows. Excel/Mac is a POS if you are a power user of Excel/Windows because the keystroke shortcuts are different, the menus are different, not all the functIons are available, it won't run many macros, there is no Visual Basic, and add-ins for specialist financial applications don't work for Excel/Mac. Basically Excel/Mac has always been a rather crippled version of Excel, and I suspect Microsoft did that deliberately, for obvious reasons.

From the initial reviews I've read, Excel/Mac 2016 addresses the keystroke shortcut problem but nothing else.

I can't use something almost the same as Excel/Windows, it has to be exactly the same. If the third party add-ins don't support Excel/Mac, for example, that's game over.

The other option is using Excel/Windows via Remote Desktop/Citrix, but the latency makes that a pain the in rear, and the Citrix Mac client doesn't support the same keystroke combos. And of course you need a good internet connection, so no working on planes etc.

Thus I have to find some way to run Excel/Windows locally.

Originally Posted by jyl (Post 8556837)

Ugh, no more Dells for me. I've had Dell, HP, Toshiba, Compaq and the only PC laptop I ever liked was the IBM Thinkpads - and I liked those a lot. But I banished PCs from my house many years ago, we have a Mac only environment at home. Since this will do double duty for personal and work, I'd like to keep things all-Mac.

I like Macs because they are very well built, smartly designed, last a long time, have a great OS, don't come loaded with poorly designed OEM bloatware. Bought the kids MacBook Airs (2014), which have been great; the wife's MacBook Pro (2011) is going strong (and I have a 16 GB RAM + SSD upgrade ready to go in).

Originally Posted by stomachmonkey (Post 8556486)

The benefit of using Boot Camp for the virtual hard disk is you have the option to reboot native if you need to.

As good as Fusion and Parallels are there are still occasions, mostly hardware related, that running native is the only option.

Certainly more of an issue on desktops than laptops.

My Infinity PCI cards will run in my MacPros when booted to Windows under boot camp but not under a VM.

There is one caveat to running the boot camp partition as your VM's disc, you can't suspend it, a total OS shut down inside the VM is required.

I find it a minor issue since booting the OS does not take much more time resuming from suspend. Although admittedly the suspend allows you to leave all apps and work open.

Which way to go really depends on what you are using Windows for and how often.

Originally Posted by Porsche-O-Phile (Post 8561199)

How is rebooting (even "native") a benefit? I don't see it as a benefit at all. One thing I utterly hate about windows machines is the fact that in most cases (even now) after installing any new driver, making any change to the registry settings or adding / removing any sort of hardware you have to waste five minutes of your life waiting for a reboot. Reboots are complete wastes of time IMHO - anything that can be done to avoid them is a benefit. This is one HUGE advantage to Linux / Apple devices. Far fewer reboots in general. I once had my Linux server up for over two years continuously without a reboot. Let's see Windows anything do that.

Originally Posted by jyl (Post 8582181)

Hey guys, what the best place and way to buy Windows 7, to install on my Mac via Parallels? I see prices from $55 to $140, am not sure which are for real, whether I should get Home or Professional, and whether there is a good reason to buy it on disc or via download? Any advice? Thanks.