Microsoft Office and OS X
- Thread starter mrnomnoms
- Start date
There's a license cleanup tool provided by Microsoft that might help you.
Thanks, that worked!
I had to delete the apps from the Applications folder, and then run the tool
Just running the tool and opening e.g., Excel did not fix it
I had to delete the apps from the Applications folder, and then run the tool
Just running the tool and opening e.g., Excel did not fix it
I've been using this for the past few years, and it works, but Excel asking for permission every time is a pain in the ass. This is an internal spreadsheet that never leaves the building, talking to a SQL Server instance that is not accessible from outside one particular subnet on our internal network.Well, the solution was to do this in Office 2016, which has a native, built-in connector for SQL Server. So now this working, but it took some effort:
- I was unable to Refresh All on a Pivot Table/SQL Query that was created in Win/Excel, even if I manually created another connection to the same database and table with the same user credentials.
- I was able to connect to the database and find the appropriate table, but there's no column browser, so I couldn't select my columns by pointing and clicking. I had to manually type out the SQL query. At least I remembered how to do that:
- Once I created a new Pivot Table from the SQL Query on the Mac side, and saved it, I was then able to open it in Win/Excel and Refresh All over there.
So it's working, but it was a pain in the ass to get there.
Apparently there is no Trust Center in Excel/Office on macOS. Is there any workaround to allow Data: Refresh All to execute without any additional clicks?
Hmmm. Here's a frustrating bug that's common to Mac Office 2021 and Win Office 2019/2021 (and probably earlier):
I have screen captures from an ancient HP 3585A Spectrum Analyzer, captured as HP-GL (.plt) files via the KE5FX GPIB Toolkit, and then converted from PLT to PostScript format using HP-GL Viewer and then further converted to PDF via macOS Preview (an older version, since macOS 13 doesn't open .ps anymore), which rendered them sideways:
,
so I rotated them in Preview, and finally inserted them into a Microsoft Word document.
When viewed in Word, the plots have the correct orientation:
but when converted to PDF via Save As: PDF (Best for electronic distribution) in Word, the plots get turned sideways, and curiously, rotate 180º from their original orientation (e.g. when converted from HP-GL):
I get the same result from all 3 versions of Office that I have access to (links at the top of the post).
I can work around this error by using Save As: PDF (Best for printing) on either platform, or, in Mac Office, by Print: Save as PDF, but then I don't get any of the hyperlinks that I've laboriously inserted into my document.
Does anyone know why this happens?
I have screen captures from an ancient HP 3585A Spectrum Analyzer, captured as HP-GL (.plt) files via the KE5FX GPIB Toolkit, and then converted from PLT to PostScript format using HP-GL Viewer and then further converted to PDF via macOS Preview (an older version, since macOS 13 doesn't open .ps anymore), which rendered them sideways:
,so I rotated them in Preview, and finally inserted them into a Microsoft Word document.
When viewed in Word, the plots have the correct orientation:
but when converted to PDF via Save As: PDF (Best for electronic distribution) in Word, the plots get turned sideways, and curiously, rotate 180º from their original orientation (e.g. when converted from HP-GL):
I get the same result from all 3 versions of Office that I have access to (links at the top of the post).
I can work around this error by using Save As: PDF (Best for printing) on either platform, or, in Mac Office, by Print: Save as PDF, but then I don't get any of the hyperlinks that I've laboriously inserted into my document.
Does anyone know why this happens?
^^
Never mind. The workaround is to re-create the PDFs from Postscript, leave them in the "wrong" orientation, insert them into the Word doc, and rotate them in Word.
Then Save As: PDF: Best for electronic works properly, producing correct graphics and preserving hyperlinks.
Never mind. The workaround is to re-create the PDFs from Postscript, leave them in the "wrong" orientation, insert them into the Word doc, and rotate them in Word.
Then Save As: PDF: Best for electronic works properly, producing correct graphics and preserving hyperlinks.
Anyone know how to get Word on MacOS to have a consistently true black background?
Obviously there's dark mode, but dark mode is more often than not a kind of bizarre gray color. It's sometimes possible to get the background of the page itself to be true black, but the bizarre gray color tends to persist:
I have no idea why Microsoft doesn't make it easier to get true blacks, but they don't, and it's incredibly annoying.
Obviously there's dark mode, but dark mode is more often than not a kind of bizarre gray color. It's sometimes possible to get the background of the page itself to be true black, but the bizarre gray color tends to persist:
I have no idea why Microsoft doesn't make it easier to get true blacks, but they don't, and it's incredibly annoying.
Most system colors don't become black in dark mode. I don't find that word behaves differently from other apps.
It may not be a perfect solution for you, since it forces the ribbon to auto-hide, but Focus mode lets you change the background color:
View->Focus, then View->Background->Black:
Dark Mode is an abomination, and I'm not-so-secretly judging you for your poor choices. You people are the same ones who reset the default font in OS 8 or 9 to some unspeakably awful distressed Western thing and pretended you were graphic designers.
I'm sorry, @JimCampbell, but perhaps you could tell the class what it's like to be so wrong, and also how you feel bad about being completely wrong.
Hey, I spent a long time calibrating the white point of this monitor — I want to see as much of it as humanly possible!
I don't understand how you stand the glare. Everything on my screen is dark, but then html emails come in with a glaring white back ground I have to delete them immediately or minimize mail as it feels like the sun on my face. Exaggeration I know, but it really does bother me.
I'm in the other camp - I get eyestrain from white letters on a black background, but never had problems with black letters on a white background, either on screen or on paper. I gave up on dark mode within a week of it becoming A Thing. I do like how Night Shift dials down the white values in the evening.
Is your monitor set to 100% brightness?
20 years ago, a high-end LCD monitor ran at 200 nits. We thought that was fine back then. A regular monitor today peaks at around 2x that; a Macbook is 2.5x that; an Apple Studio Display is 3x that. 500-600 nits aimed at your face.
The peak brightness of these modern displays is meant to allow you to compensate for unusually bright environments, like sunny floor-to-ceiling windows or a photo studio. If you're in a regular office, then setting it to "fight back against the sun" levels is absolutely going to cause your pupils to contract. Don't do that. A monitor should be just slightly above the average ambient light levels of the room it's in. For most modern displays, that's probably well below the max. In a darker space, like a basement, it maybe just above minimum.
My white point is calibrated for print. People who see the screen are aghast at how not-bright and kind-of-yellow it is. Nothing 'pops' on this screen, because I don't want/need it to!
Thank you for this! It's definitely better than nothing, although I still don't understand why Microsoft doesn't make this an easily solvable problem in the OLED era.
I'm not sure if it's related to a recent update, but when revising a shared document that I did not create, my name (on the changes or comments) becomes "author" each time the doc autosaves.
Pretty annoying.
EDIT: nevermind, that was a protection setting.
Pretty annoying.
EDIT: nevermind, that was a protection setting.
Last edited:
Ironically, when I had a job that required removing metadata from documents, I considered this a killer feature. As far as I know, Office on Windows forces you to go through Inspect Document every time to remove authors. One of those rare cases where MS actually gave OSX a better feature.
Well I hope the MS execs get OLEDs soon. They're not that expensive any more!
What determines whether Excel automatically converts pasted text into columns or not?
I have this fancy Excel sheet that charts my bee hive's daily weight gain:
I have a Raspberry Pi connected to 4 stamps.com postal scales, logging the weight every 10 minutes to a text file. Until I can figure out how to automagically push data up to a Google sheet and produce this same chart, I'm stuck opening that text file every few days and copy/pasting new data into Excel.
Sometimes I paste new data, and Excel helpfully figures out that it can be parsed into 8 or 12 columns by dash or space character.
Sometimes it doesn't, and I have to do Data: Text to Columns manually.
What I can't figure out it why it behaves differently. I can't correlate the behavior with whether the workbook has recently had data pasted into it, or whether other workbooks are open, or whether I copy the trailing carriage return, or whether I've saved since the last paste, or, ?????
It just seems to be random.
I have this fancy Excel sheet that charts my bee hive's daily weight gain:
I have a Raspberry Pi connected to 4 stamps.com postal scales, logging the weight every 10 minutes to a text file. Until I can figure out how to automagically push data up to a Google sheet and produce this same chart, I'm stuck opening that text file every few days and copy/pasting new data into Excel.
Sometimes I paste new data, and Excel helpfully figures out that it can be parsed into 8 or 12 columns by dash or space character.
Sometimes it doesn't, and I have to do Data: Text to Columns manually.
What I can't figure out it why it behaves differently. I can't correlate the behavior with whether the workbook has recently had data pasted into it, or whether other workbooks are open, or whether I copy the trailing carriage return, or whether I've saved since the last paste, or, ?????
It just seems to be random.
Is it possible to change the way the txt file is written on the Pi? Using a more widely used delimiter like a tab or a comma instead of a space between the values might help. Also you have some dashes in the data file which can also be used as a delimiter. I can't speak to how Excel is 'making decisions' here, but if you unify around a single delimiter it will most likely clear up the issue.
As far as pushing the value to a Google Sheet. It's kind of off topic here. You can direct message me and I'd be happy to work through it with you. I've got a lot of experience with Apps Script, mostly for hobbyist type stuff. Or start a different thread since it's not really Office pertinent.
Edit: I'm 99% sure just throwing "How I can get my Raspberry Pi to write information to a Google Sheet" into ChatGPT will get you almost all the way there.
As far as pushing the value to a Google Sheet. It's kind of off topic here. You can direct message me and I'd be happy to work through it with you. I've got a lot of experience with Apps Script, mostly for hobbyist type stuff. Or start a different thread since it's not really Office pertinent.
Edit: I'm 99% sure just throwing "How I can get my Raspberry Pi to write information to a Google Sheet" into ChatGPT will get you almost all the way there.
Last edited:
Also, I'm trying to step through the timeline in Excel to make an animation. This code works fine in Excel/Win to produce 1.png, 2.png, 3.png, etc., for further processing in ffmpeg, but it fails on my Mac with:
Code:
Sub MakeChartLoop()
Dim NumLoops As Integer
NumLoops = 100
Sheets("Weight").Range("RowsToPlot").Value = 1000
Dim ThisLoop As Integer
For ThisLoop = 1 To NumLoops
Sheets("Weight").Range("RowsToPlot").Value = Sheets("Weight").Range("RowsToPlot").Value + 10
Call exportChart(ThisLoop)
Next ThisLoop
End Sub
Sub exportChart(Index As Integer)
'Dim IndexString As String
Dim endFileName As String
Dim theChart As ChartObject
Set theChart = Sheets("Weight").ChartObjects("WeightLogChart")
'Set IndexString = Index.ToString
'build file path and name
'make sure to concatenate the backslash or you will land in the
'parent folder with the target folder in the filename
endFileName = ThisWorkbook.Path & Application.PathSeparator & "images" & Application.PathSeparator & Index & ".png"
theChart.Chart.Export endFileName
End SubSounds like a directory permissions issue. Maybe use an absolute path rather than a relative one and create it in advance.
Also check System Settings > Privacy & Security > Full Disk Access as well and see if there is an entry for Excel or VBA Runtime or something like that and enable it.
Also check System Settings > Privacy & Security > Full Disk Access as well and see if there is an entry for Excel or VBA Runtime or something like that and enable it.
Last edited:
Thanks! The path resolves properly to
"/Users/steven/Documents/Beekeeping/HiveWeight/images/1.png"
and the path separators are correct, because if I change /images/, which exists, to /images2/, which does not, then the error changes to Path Not Found.
I added Excel to the Full Disk Access list, but I still get the error.
So I took your suggestion about paths and just deleted it all:
endFileName = Index & ".png"
and now it runs, and puts all the PNGs at:
/Users/steven/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.Excel/Data/*.png
So it's progress, because now I don't have to round-trip this through a Windows box, and it runs about 10x faster on my Mac than on that old Windows box anyway.
But I'd really like it to go into the correct location.
edit: Console reports:
Sandbox: Microsoft Excel(55877) deny(1) file-write-create /Users/steven/Documents/Beekeeping/HiveWeight/images/1.png
and
ls -l /Users/steven/Documents/Beekeeping/HiveWeight/
reports:
drwxr-xr-x@ 3 steven staff 96 May 17 18:17 images
"/Users/steven/Documents/Beekeeping/HiveWeight/images/1.png"
and the path separators are correct, because if I change /images/, which exists, to /images2/, which does not, then the error changes to Path Not Found.
I added Excel to the Full Disk Access list, but I still get the error.
So I took your suggestion about paths and just deleted it all:
endFileName = Index & ".png"
and now it runs, and puts all the PNGs at:
/Users/steven/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.Excel/Data/*.png
So it's progress, because now I don't have to round-trip this through a Windows box, and it runs about 10x faster on my Mac than on that old Windows box anyway.
But I'd really like it to go into the correct location.
edit: Console reports:
Sandbox: Microsoft Excel(55877) deny(1) file-write-create /Users/steven/Documents/Beekeeping/HiveWeight/images/1.png
and
ls -l /Users/steven/Documents/Beekeeping/HiveWeight/
reports:
drwxr-xr-x@ 3 steven staff 96 May 17 18:17 images
Last edited:
I haven’t checked if things have changed recently, but I don’t think there is a way around the sandboxing. I recall having a similar problem writing AppleScripts for Excel a few years ago (in my case, I think it was trying to get workbooks not to open in protected mode) and finding that the only place they opened correctly was in the MS Data folder.
Offhand, you could maybe put together an Automator action that would take files added to Data and move them to your desired directory.
Offhand, you could maybe put together an Automator action that would take files added to Data and move them to your desired directory.
There are a few directories that specifically require elevated privileges and usually throw an authorization request due to sandboxing. I believe Documents and Desktop are two of them. It’s likely VBA isn’t able to make that request and just fails. Perhaps try a different folder such as just:
And then add a folder action script attached to that folder to move it to the proper location. Or just do that straight away in the container folder as @Honeybog suggested.
You could also try:
to add write privileges to that folder and then try again with the original VB code. You might need to throw sudo at the front of that.
~/imagesAnd then add a folder action script attached to that folder to move it to the proper location. Or just do that straight away in the container folder as @Honeybog suggested.
You could also try:
chmod 777 /Users/steven/Documents/Beekeeping/HiveWeight/to add write privileges to that folder and then try again with the original VB code. You might need to throw sudo at the front of that.
Last edited:
Is there a script that can move sent items in Outlook to the Inbox for easier filing? On Windows, Outlook has more granular settings for saving sent emails.
The next project will be trying to duplicate Quick Steps without admin privileges.
The next project will be trying to duplicate Quick Steps without admin privileges.
I just sudo'ed this:
-rw-r--r--@ 1 steven staff 980 May 17 21:53 images
but I still get permission denied.
Yeah, I could use some scripting and folder actions to move the images to where I need them, but it's just a minor inconvenience at this point. The important part is getting everything processed locally, on this machine. Thanks @gabemaroz for the suggestion to change the location.
The weird thing is that my exact same behavior sometimes results in auto-conversion, and other times results in this:
It takes me 5 seconds to convert it manually, but I'd love to figure out why it doesn't do it automatically ~5% of the time.
I have another thread, and I think my error has been pointed out. I just need to find a few minutes to re-create my credentials properly.
But I keep getting distracted by my Office questions
I’m not sure what happened but you want write permission for the user, group, and everyone. Also, the lack of a d (directory flag) at the beginning is concerning. Ideally for problem solving here you want:
drwxrwxrwx@ 1 steven staff 980 May 17 21:53 imagesI’m fairly confident it’s related to the delimiter issue I mentioned above.
At this point it’s probably better to use another tool to prepare the file. Python maybe? It will create the csv and you can open it in excel without a problemThe weird thing is that my exact same behavior sometimes results in auto-conversion, and other times results in this:
View attachment 80969
It takes me 5 seconds to convert it manually, but I'd love to figure out why it doesn't do it automatically ~5% of the time.
I have another thread, and I think my error has been pointed out. I just need to find a few minutes to re-create my credentials properly.
But I keep getting distracted by my Office questions
Pretty sure it's your default system delimiter, and whatever you've set the "text to columns"-wizard to the last time
If it's from a .csv you can also do Data->Get Data (Power Query)->From Text (Legacy) to get a more robust interface.
(LibreOffice has a handy import interface when you open a .csv file, something that Microsoft should learn from...)
OK, so the MacOS version of Outlook has Favorites folders that are easily accessible for quick filing, so I drag and drop the emails instead of trying to replicate Quick Steps. Now, is there a way to make this version of Outlook save Sent items to the Inbox? Rules don't seem to be able to do it.
Friends don’t let friends use Endnote.You should try the holy trinity of evil software: a long word document with pictures, tables and text boxes embedded in the text and Endnote as the reference manager to create a bibliography. This evil concoction has me screaming at my iMac in no time.
… unless the coauthors of said friend demand Endnote.
I still remember how horrible former versions of Office were but I long for an update.
Also, anyone know if any of the python + excel goodies will make it to the Mac at some point?
The xlwings developer (Python add-in for Excel) had this to say about those goodies. Spoiler: the way MS implemented this feature has a lot of flaws.Friends don’t let friends use Endnote.
… unless the coauthors of said friend demand Endnote.
I still remember how horrible former versions of Office were but I long for an update.
Also, anyone know if any of the python + excel goodies will make it to the Mac at some point?
Friends don’t let friends use Endnote.
… unless the coauthors of said friend demand Endnote.
I used FileMaker to manage my bibliography, track captions, and generate my appendices for my thesis. It was… deeply antisocial behavior.