A love letter to Macabacus
Dear Macabacus,
We met in 2011. I was a junior analyst, someone else was paying for you, and you made my models look like I knew what I was doing.
Fifteen years later I’m still not over you. Employers paid for you for a decade, and then I paid for you myself: A$1,140 since 2021, every cent of it willingly. You do a lot of things, and I’m doing you a disservice by focusing on one, but it’s the number, colour and border cycles that I can’t live without. One key, press it again, done. AutoColor alone has probably saved me a week of my life.
Then I got a MacBook, and it turns out you don’t do Macs. The full version of Macabacus is Windows-only, and the official advice is to run Windows in a virtual machine like Parallels, which is a bit like being told to move house to keep using your favourite pen.
There’s Macabacus Lite, a lighter Office add-in that’s apparently compatible with Excel for Mac.1 I tried, many times, and on my Mac it’s a spinning wheel every time.
So, with love and some frustration, I built my own: Excel Excelsior For Mac, a free add-in that puts the formatting cycles I use most back under one key each. It’s a fraction of what you do, and it isn’t trying to be you.
If you’re on Windows, just get Macabacus. If you’re on a Mac, you know where to find me.
Yours, still,
George