M1 Praises from an Accountant

[ian87w]

I just switched jobs, and when I learned that my new company supports Macs, I was very tempted to switch. I've used Windows professionally for 10+ years as an accountant (controller), and am very fast with shortcuts in excel. I was so disappointed with my work PCs (last one was only 1 year old HP Elitebook with 32gb of RAM), that I made the leap to a MacBook Pro M1 (unfortunately the IT group gave me 8 gb RAM, but it's holding up great)

One large spreadsheet in particular (200K+ rows, lots of formulas/calculations, tabs, pivots) would take 30 seconds or more to Calculate with every change you made. Many times if I had other applications running, Excel would turn to Not Responding and crash. On the M1 MBP, each calculation takes maybe 1-2 seconds. You can see the CPU spike up when I make a change (it goes up to 550% of usage, which I don't understand), but I never get a beachball. The spreadsheet is still large, and it lags a bit when moving around, but never a spinning circle like I would get in Windows all the time.

Between the combination of assigning specific shortcuts in Excel in SysPref, the Accelerator Keys for Excel program, and the now excellent shortcut support in O365 (which keeps the majority of Windows shortcuts on the Mac), Excel is 98% the same for me as the Windows counterpart. There were a few new keystrokes to learn, but that took about a week to put into muscle memory. There are a few nitpicks - no moving through the items in a filter window with page up/page down/home/end to select them, no shortcuts for formatting pivot tables, and a couple others. Overall, I would take the speed and responsiveness in calculating large spreadsheets over losing out on a few shortcuts.

I also traded in my iPad Pro, because I watch movies and surf the web after work on my MB instead of my iPad. Previously, I needed an iPad because I couldn't use my work laptop for doing any of that - it would heat up in my bag, the battery wouldn't last more than an hour, and it's too hot and clunky to have on your lap for casual movie watching. I could go on and on - Love Love Love my MBP M1! I wouldn't have made the switch a few years ago with the old versions of Excel for Mac, but we've finally hit that point - hopefully they continue to improve Excel for Mac.


TL/DR: Most reviews focus on workflows for creative professionals - but the M1 makes for a killer corporate finance laptop as well.

Thank you for your review from a different perspective. Your usage will be similar to mine, and I've been contemplating whether I should switch to Mac for my next upgrade (since none of my computers can run Windows 11 anyway).

 

[Gregintosh]

There is also external Num Pads. So you don't even need the whole keyboard just the num pad part if you are using the laptop on the go. At home, you can always dock with a keyboard and use an external keyboard and mouse.

 

[pshufd]

I remember old keyboards that didn't have numeric keypads. They had numbers on the letters, maybe WER-SDF-XCV and perhaps a numbers lock or number shift key. I haven't seen one of these things in a very long time though.

Laptops with numeric keypads are usually 17 inch models and rather heavy.

I can understand not wanting to carry a separate device. Some of the tables at Starbucks are pretty small and there isn't room for an accessory; not even a touchpad or mouse.

 

[polyphenol]

Some of the tables at Starbucks are pretty small and there isn't room for an accessory; not even a touchpad or mouse.

Do people actually seriously work at accountancy in a Starbucks?

I'd have thought privacy precluded most of that. Would you want anyone passing to be able to see your business affairs?

And the horrible coffee.

 

[pshufd]

Do people actually seriously work at accountancy in a Starbucks?

I'd have thought privacy precluded most of that. Would you want anyone passing to be able to see your business affairs?

And the horrible coffee.

I use native resolution on MacBook Pros for development. If people can read that from ten feet away, more power to them.

I assume that any information on the internet or, that is held by third parties, isn't private.

 

[polyphenol]

I use native resolution on MacBook Pros for development. If people can read that from ten feet away, more power to them.

I assume that any information on the internet or, that is held by third parties, isn't private.

Often a matter of principle - for example the accountancy professional bodies' best practice guidelines.

The information being processed might or might not be "on" the internet.

 

[pshufd]

Often a matter of principle - for example the accountancy professional bodies' best practice guidelines.

The information being processed might or might not be "on" the internet.

The company I used to work for collected a lot of that information. Kind of scary actually. They sold it too of course.

 

[NazgulRR]

So jealous reading this. Working in large financial institutions is sooo sad when all you get is a locked down 3 year old PC laptop, running a 2 year old Win10 version and 2 year old O365 with 8GB ram and lots of spyware/anti virus crap loaded that makes the laptop sound like a jet engine whenever you want to open up two spreadsheets and a browser at once. I bet they even doubled down on the amount of various tracking software since the pandemic and WFH began. I cannot believe how slow O365 runs on that laptop with very simple spreadsheets.

Also have an M1 MBA (for personal use) and REALLY wish I could switch to it for work. Alas it will never happen. Though not sure I fully agree on the shortcuts arguments fully - or maybe I just haven’t tried them in a long time. There’s no alternative for all ALT shortcuts on a Mac to access and navigate the ribbon, is there?