[JeffreyAtack]

Hi friends...first time poster.

My issue (apologies in advance for the long explanation):

Using a Windows PC @ work (HP Laptop, Win XP, Excel 2007) and doing a lot of Excel based reporting, including various VBA Macros.

System performance is pretty average based on the limitations of XP (e.g. max 4GB ram). Informed by IT that upgrade to Win 7 + "possible" hardware upgrade is not due until 2014.

Possible solution is to bring my own higher specced laptop in to do all the report crunching.

I am a Mac user @ home (wife's iMac 2011, kids MBA 2011) and am in the market for a new Macbook for myself, and had the idea of buying something I could do the Excel reporting on.

So, first step was trial one of my main Excel reports on the home Macs. So, I tried the following:

1) Excel for Mac, running on the iMac (2.7GHz i5, 12GB Ram)
2) Excel for Mac, running on the MBA (1.7GHz i5, 4GB Ram)
3) Excel (Office preview version) running on the Win 8 Consumer preview through Boot Camp

The macro performance (speed) of all three were pretty terrible, and certainly worse than running on the work PC.

To try and rule out if either the iMac's spinning hard drive, or the MBA's moderate RAM were the issues, I dropped into an Apple store and opened up the file (in Excel for Mac) on a mid-specced Retina MBP.

Disappointingly, while the speed was better than the other two Macs, it probably wasn't any better then the Windows machine.

The only other scenario I can think of is running say Windows 7, Excel 2007/2010 through Boot Camp on a rMBP.

Anyone have any success getting VBA macros to run fast on a Mac??

The thought of buying a Windows PC brings me to tears.

[technologist]

I can't speak for the preview versions of Office or Windows, but if you use Boot Camp with the current release versions (Win7/2010) you should see pretty good performance.

Forget about getting any sort of speed out of Office 2011. Just getting the capability to run VBA macros on the OS X version at all took years of pleading with Microsoft.

[CEEJAY99]

I am running Office 2010 for PC in a VMWARE virtual PC and Office 2011 for MAC on the same iMAC.
The Windows version is much much faster even though it is running in a virtual PC on the same hardware!
I can only presume that programming the MAC version was given to the office tea person.

The MAC version also exhibits some very strange behaviour at times, but then so does the PC version when importing spreadsheets from Excel2007. E.g. it resizes the text on command buttons - sometimes bigger and sometimes smaller - whenever they are pressed. This could be a VMWARE problem, to be fair to Microsoft.

Getting web queries to work from earlier versions is also problematic, behaving quite differently on MAC and virtual PC.

My advice is, if it works in Excel2007 then avoid a lot of hassle and don't 'upgrade' to a later version which is not fully compatible.