Our Software

All of our machines, except the server run on OS X 10.5. I have not gotten around to upgrading the server, but hope to find the time soon.

Like most businesses, the bulk of what we do most days occurs in MS Office. We use Office 2004. I upgraded one machine to 2008 and had to go back. We simply cannot use 2008 because the new version of Excel (which we use probably more than anything) doesn't support macros. Because of this, key functions like XIRR and XNPV do not transfer from Mac to Windows very well. Well, not at all, so we are stuck. Excel 2008 really isn't any better than Numbers. It also lacks a Solver and other pretty important features.

For word processing, we probably use Pages and Word equally, depending on the user's preference. For presentations, we are almost 100% Keynote. Powerpoint used to be a great package, but now it is just a bloated pile of fail.

Our email, contacts and calendar are in Entourage. We don't love it and are always looking for an alternative (more on that later) but there are a couple of things we really like about it, like categories for contacts. We use a hosted Exchange service and love our provider of that for their great customer service. We aren't married to Exchange, but until Apple does something with their absolutely worthless iCal, there really isn't an alternative.

Other stuff we use often: Google Earth Pro, Fastrak Schedule, Omnigraffle, iChat, Safari and Firefox. We have a couple of machines with Parallels so we can run Windows. We basically do this for two reasons: 1) to test models in Excel before sending to Windows folks; and 2) to access certain web sites that only support IE.