Today I worked with two clients who use Excel 2011 on a Mac computer. Personally, I use version 2010 on my Windows 7 desktop PC and version 2013 on my Windows 8 laptop, so it’s always a bit of a challenge for me to get my head around the way the Mac handles things differently, such as menus.
The first client was one for whom I had created a simplified spreadsheet for keeping track of income and expenditure on a number of different bank accounts, with entries analysed by account and category. The sheet was based on her original “account book” style sheet, but I made the entries a lot tighter and set up Pivot Tables to analyse the transactions in the way she required. I originally built this workbook for her back in January, but there wasn’t time for her to put all her 2013-14 tax year information in before the deadline on 31st, so she decided to leave the bulk of the data transfer till the new tax year – which brings us to now.
In the end, there was little for me to do. I just reminded her how to add new entries and also that if she wants to add new income and expenditure categories, these have to go into a separate lookup table, as I have used data validation to limit the entries that can be added to her main table. She is now happy to add her own entries and bring her financial record-keeping up to date.
The second client had a rather more serious problem. For some months, he has been very happily running a workbook I created for him with a macro-driven automated invoicing system. He simply clicks on a command button and Excel spits out all due invoices in PDF format. For some reason, this has suddenly stopped working. He has not changed anything, but there was an operating system update, which may have triggered this. It’s difficult for me to test, as the macro runs fine on my Windows PCs, so I have to go to his premises and use his computer.
Sadly, I was not able to fix it fully today. I quickly identified that the problem was in the part of the macro that saves the invoice into PDF format, but have not been able to get this to behave properly. I have left him with a work-around that uses an alternative method of producing the invoices, but this creates a separate PDF for each sheet in the workbook – so each time he creates an invoice he gets three or four unwanted PDF files as well and has to delete them. I am currently researching the problem and hope to fix it properly next week, but I will be delivering a new training course on Monday, so will need to spend some time preparing for that first!
