PC/Mac Cross Platform Frustrations

My last post on Using Excel to Create HTML, I discussed using Excel to automatically create HTML for a friend Cinda.

I use a PC (actually a network of PC’s, I use more than one computer) running Windows XP.

Cinda uses a Mac.

Our first incompatibility was one character. 

Specifically the Mac’s desire to turn apostrophe's into curly quotes.

Cinda would edit the spreadsheet and the web page from the created HTML would display a diamond with a question mark inside.

A Google search showed the mysterious character was a Unicode Replacement Glyph, what web browsers display when presented with a character they don’t understand.

That could be solved by a search and replace inside a macro to replace the ASCII code of the curly quote with the ASCII code for a straight quote.

Cinda had Microsoft Excel 2008 for the Mac, so I upgraded one of the computers in the network with Office 2007 so we’d both be running compatible versions.  And I wrote a macro in Visual Basic for Applications to take the Google form spreadsheets, combine them into a single update spreadsheet, along the way reordering the columns to make them consistent (different forms had different fields from different questions).  It would make it easier for Cinda to review the incoming registrations before adding them to a master database spreadsheet.  What made the macro “interesting” was making it generalized so it could handle any number of rows in any of the three spreadsheets and produce a contiguous review spreadsheet.  It didn’t help I hadn’t done any VBA programming in quite awhile.

Imagine the surprise we discovered when Cinda couldn’t use the macro.  A quick Google search after a few rounds of emails to see if the lack of macros were a result of a security setting.  To our mutual dismay, it turns out Microsoft didn’t implement macros (aka VBA).  So the effort to create a macro to make it easier for Cinda has been met by yet another cross platform “gotcha".”

It looks like the long term solution to this problem will be for both of us to install the free Open Office 3.0 software, unfortunately that means re-writing all the VBA code into openoffice.org basic.  What fun, yet another programming model to master.