Mac and Windows operating systems, made by Apple and Microsoft respectively, are two different types of computer designs with their own strengths and weaknesses. If you are looking to purchase a computer for your business, it's helpful to know how the two operating systems differ to see which one would be appropriate for use by you and your employees. Many of their differences are purely cosmetic, but others are significant, including their built-in system tools, available applications, and overall usability. Graphical User Interface (GUI) Windows' trademark design is its Start menu, the globe with the Windows logo where all files, folders, and applications can be found. Mac OS has Finder, very much like Windows Explorer, and the Dock, a small strip of application icons at the bottom of the screen for easy access to your most-used programs, similar to the taskbar on the Windows desktop. This is mostly a cosmetic difference: two ways of accessing your files and applications.

Windows also keeps its Start bar at the bottom (you can move it to the top or either side) while Apple has its menu bar at the top. The placement of the close, minimize, and maximize buttons are also reversed: Windows has its buttons on the top right while Mac OS has its buttons on the top left. Design Apple computer parts are all built by and for a single manufacturer: Apple. Conversely, a Windows PC may use hardware from a dozen different manufacturers. Because of this, Macs tend to run a bit more smoothly since all the hardware components were made to work with each other and with nothing else. However, this also means that if a Windows computer needs a replacement part, it can be found from a variety of sources; if your Mac needs repair, you will typically need an Apple part (unless it is something like a hard drive or RAM).

Hardware and Replacements Apple computers are rather resilient to change; on MacBooks especially, the case design leaves little room for opening up your computer and changing parts. Windows computers are more accessible, and hardware can be swapped out more easily. People who build their own computers prefer using Windows due to the simplicity of upgrading individual parts instead of buying a new computer. If this isn't a necessity, the simplicity of buying a custom-designed Mac from Apple's online store is a plus.

Using Excel on a Macbook. Budgeting & Forecasting; Fletcher Riehl. Title: Owner Company. One thing that is different when running an Excel spreadsheet on Mac and PC is the case of getting a file name. (actually since 1984 when it was called MS Chart) and find it very capable as a replacement for Excel on a Windows computer. Excel ribbon in Windows with accelerator keys visible. No equivalent on the Mac! Just different. Finally, some Excel shortcuts are just plain different on a Mac. For example, the shortcut for Edit Cell in Windows is F2, and on a Mac, it's Control + U.

Security Windows' popularity also harms it. Because Windows is more widely used, people who create viruses will often skip making them for Mac, choosing the broader Windows audience.

Mac OS isn't necessarily more secure -- in fact, one security expert declared that Windows 7 was more secure than Mac OS X -- just less popular. When it comes down to which system is more secure, that tends to change depending on which version of each OS is out at the time, though both Apple and Microsoft constantly release updates to patch security holes.

There are also significantly more antivirus and other security programs available for Windows; the repertoire of security software available for the Mac OS is small.

In the charts below, Schmucker breaks down feature-by-feature exactly what you get (and don’t get) in each of the different versions of the productivity suite including Office 2016 and 2013 for Windows, Office 2016 and 2011 for Mac,. The full charts (below) show suite-wide differences between the versions such as missing apps, lack of support for Visual Basic and ActiveX, right-to-left language support, accessibility features, AppleScript and much more.

Other charts in the study show feature variations for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, with the majority of the features listed unavailable for iPad users and a mixed bag for the other versions. And Schmucker points out two things regarding the iPad specifically.

One positive is support for right-to-left languages, which he notes is something that Mac users have bene asking for but have yet to receive, while a negative for the iPad is lack of multiple selection support in PowerPoint, something Schmucker notes is a pretty basic but crucial function for the app. In the end, he concludes that a mix of the various Office suites is the best approach but admits that his main, go-to version is MacOffice 2011 (apart from using the latest version of Outlook due to enhanced performance): “I worked for the MacOffice team at Microsoft for several years, and at that time I also worked closely with colleagues on the WinOffice teams. Because of this background, I am often able to pick just the right Office app that will make a given task the easiest to do. One task might be particularly well suited to MacWord 2011 because Publishing Layout View— a feature only in that one Word version— will make this task easy. Free download mac os for virtualbox. Another task might be suited to WinPPT because of the Animation Painter, which is not in any MacPPT version. Yet another task might be best suited to WInPPT 2013 because it needs an Office extension not available in other Office suites.” And this is what Schmucker’s setup looks like with various versions of Office installed on Mac and using virtual machines: • MacOffice 2011 is my main productivity suite and is installed on my El Capitan MacBook Pro. MacOutlook 2016 came out long before the entire MacOffice 2016 suite, and because of the vastly improved performance of MacOutlook 2016, I use it as my main email client, instead of MacOutlook 2011.