Apple Teams Up With IBM for Enterprise Push

Re:Apple Teams Up With IBM for Enterprise Push by jbigelow76 on Tuesday July 15, 2014 @06:01PM (#8039348)

And at the pinnacle of the "perfect synergy" will be the C-levels and execs saying "This <industry specific iOS app> is awesome for my world wide safesforce! Now how do I export all the data to Excel?"

This initiative probably has the MS Office 365 marketing people salivating.

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Re:Apple Teams Up With IBM for Enterprise Push by r00fus on Tuesday July 15, 2014 @07:43PM (#8039819)

It's quite easy to export moderately sized data sets to xlsx.

The trick is to allow the analysis to happen within the app, and not as vlookups and pivot tables in Excel (as the user is more comfortable with).

Ultimately, this is Microsoft's failing as Excel should have become a cloud/server-powered think-desktop/tablet app a long time ago with versioning and multi-user support. Sure that existed back in the late 90s with ODBC and data links, but it was too fragile and was not significantly improved in the decade and a half since.

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Re:Apple Teams Up With IBM for Enterprise Push by mistermann on Wednesday July 16, 2014 @08:51AM (#8041719)

Some of the capabilities they have now with PowerView/PowerPivot/Hadoop are technically impressive.

http://edu-kinect.com/blog/2014/06/23/microsoft-brings-hadoo...

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Re:Apple Teams Up With IBM for Enterprise Push by threeseed on Tuesday July 15, 2014 @07:45PM (#8039825)

Numbers (Apple's spreadsheeting software) is with the exception of macros fully compatible with Excel. And like Office 365 is also online.

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Re:Apple Teams Up With IBM for Enterprise Push by Mister_Snuggles on Tuesday July 15, 2014 @08:12PM (#8039910)

Not quite. Macros are probably the biggest thing that's missing, but there are others.

Some documents that I've prepared in Excel with complex (meaning not all that complex) don't come into Numbers properly (a stacked bar with one series as a line, for example).

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Re:Apple Teams Up With IBM for Enterprise Push by yardie on Wednesday July 16, 2014 @05:30AM (#8041250)

I'm a daily users of Numbers and I can say unequivocally it is not quite close enough. They get 90-95% percent of it right. It's that last 5% that always give me headaches when I export an xlsx.

It's not just the macros but 100s of little things that break compatibility.

If you use Numbers with Excel for anything but the most basic spreadsheet list you are going to have a bad time.

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Re:Apple Teams Up With IBM for Enterprise Push by VLM on Wednesday July 16, 2014 @08:48AM (#8041712)

Transition from Excel to "something else" merely has to be not much worse than transition from Excel 20?? to Excel 20??. Or even if it is worse, be worth the pain.

Its something of a stereotype but generally Excel to "something else" is less painful than old Excel to new Excel.

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