When looking for software, there are two sides of me that have an input into the decision. As a geek I look for cool, shiny, well branded, stuff with a super slick interface. As an MBA, I look for efficient, effective products, with low maintenance.

Usually Apple satisfies both the geek and the MBA. This is not the case with spreadsheet programs.

After losing a hard drive I had to re-install an office program, and I thought I’d do whatever I could to avoid giving Microsoft any more money. Here’s a quick, account of my spreadsheet search.

Neo Office - Let’s go Open Source
I like open source, I like the idea of it, I actually donate to things like Wikipedia because I think they’re cool. I tried Neo Office (which is a Mac implementation of Open Office). Here’s why it didn’t cut it:

• Speed, it was slow, clicking was sluggish, and keyboard shortcuts weren’t snappy
• Interface, clunky at best, some parts of it looked unfinished, financial models need to feel… safe
• Shortcuts, were different than PC excel, and not enough of them.
• Formatting, sucked. Not a lot of different options or easy support for conditional formatting.

Bottom Line: If you are hardcore open source or way too cheap to pay for software, maybe you can deal with Neo Office, otherwise, its pretty awful.

Numbers – A spreadsheet for none of us
I love Apple, but Numbers is terrible for a lot of the same reasons. Interface was good, and graphs were neat, but on the whole the basics weren’t there.

• Shortcuts, different, and not apparent
• Speed,  didn’t react fast enough to editing cell formulas
• Defaults, the formula bar is defaulted off… obviously not designed for people who do calculations

Bottom Line: Pretty cool, lots of nifty features, but really light on the core functionality I need for calculations and modeling.

Mac Excel – Microsoft ruins its only good thing
Mac excel has such promise. It has all the good pieces of Office 2007 like formatting and a neat new interface, but it strays so far from PC Excel that converts can’t do it.

• Shortcuts, different from PC Excel and different from Apple conventions, its impossible to figure out without help menu visits
• Formatting palette, the floating formatting palette is redundant and hard to find what you need.
• Stability, it crashes way too often. Losing data sucks, and losing detailed number oriented data sucks more.

Bottom Line: Lots of good here, but a few crucial details prevent it from being useful. Shortcuts are a huge deal!!! I don’t mind re-learning some, but why is there no Insert > Rows shortcut in mac excel… not hidden, just not there.

For now this Apple enthusiast will have to settle for using Apple products most of the time. When I need to do real spreadsheet work I fire up parallels and open Microsoft Excel for the PC. The MBA in me wins this round.

Winner: Microsoft Excel 2007 for PC.

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