Microsoft Excel

Office 07 and Office 08

I have the luxury of co-teaching a course called Educational Technology and Design which allows me to teach all different types of technology and programs. This pass week I had the opportunity to teach Microsoft Excel for the Office 07 for the PC platform and Office 08 for the Mac platform. Although these programs have been released for a while now the university in which I am employed recently upgraded the computers around campus over the summer which meant it was time to teach the new program.

As I stated before I co-teach this course and therefore have weekly meetings on Tuesday. At this meeting I've learned from a few of the professors that the goal for Microsoft was there was not supposed to be a very big difference between office programs between the Mac and the PC. Well if that is the goal then they have a long ways to go. In fact they may be moving backwards. I personally feel that Office 03 were closer in how programs ran then 08. Take Microsoft Excel for example, these programs are so different that a novice to either one of the platforms would be in a world of trouble.

Before going into detail of Microsoft Excel I would like to state my bias for PC over the Mac. Yes the Mac is getting better and I do realize I need to be knowledgeable in the functions of the platform but Mac has not grown on me yet. For that matter I have not even owned and IPod and don’t even want to own one. So maybe it goes further then that and I just don’t approve of Apple. I will save my Mac bashing for later. But would like to end bias message by a quote I have been hearing a lot lately dealing with the US presidential election. I prefer PC over the Mac. My username is ggill01 and I approve this message.

The professor’s I work with are advocates of Mac and I am an advocate of PC. Relating this message back to Microsoft Excel they prefer the program for many reasons but one of the main reasons is the formatting tool bar offered with the Mac. I personally do not like the tool bar because it just get’s in the way. There is nothing else to it then that, but when I am working on my workbook I often times have to keep moving that toolbar because it is in the way of something. Unless you have a make with a screen that is 22 in or larger you will probably have to keep moving that toolbar around to.

To look at the PC I prefer not having that formatting toolbar that is just in the way. I will stick with my PC that has the formatting toolbar with all the other menus at the top of the screen. Another reason I like this tool bar because it is more dynamic. If I insert a chart to my workbook my “dynamic” toolbar enables more options that deal with formatting of the chart. The same could be done with a table or graph.

So this is just two perspectives of the Microsoft Excel program. But regardless of the perspectives the programs were not created similar to the two platforms but created differently.