One little app that I find indispensable is MacJournal from Mariner Software. Mariner is an old timer in the software biz--if you are old enough to remember pre-Windows or even Windows 2.0, you may recall that there were other spreadsheets and word processors before MS came to dominate. A very good one was Pascal and Pascal Write, which was a Mariner product.
MacJournal is touted as a journaling and blog software package. It does do that stuff--I can do a post in MacJournal and have it post here, if I want. For me, though I could do that stuff in a lot of different ways. The value in MacJournal, as I see it, is a catch all for all the stuff you need to keep--at least for a while, but don't know where to put. It is like the little corner of my desk where stuff that is important enough to keep but not important enough or long lived enough to file sits.
Say you are doing research on a project. You get stuff from newspapers, emails web searches, whatever. You know you are going to need this stuff, but it isn't worth bookmarking in your browser. Or, perhaps you just want it all in one place under the project name. MacJournal is perfect for organizing all that stuff. You can put whatever you want into it (at least so far I have not found anything that would not work), organize it the way you want and have it all at your fingertips if you need it.
It is one of the few software packages that I really am glad I have--a real convenience rather than a boring necessity.
Hopefully soon they will come out with an iPhone version to sync with the desktop version. Even if they don't, it is a great package.
Showing posts with label Software. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Software. Show all posts
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Accounting Software
The one major difficulty in running a business entirely on Macs is the availability of decent accounting software. Basically, you have two options: Quickbooks and MYOB. Quickbooks is easy to use and works fine for a sole proprietor, but it falls flat as things get a little more complicated. MYOB Accountedge, though it has a strange interface, can take a small business much farther.
It has a good chart of accounts functionality, good controls built in and is generally superior to Quickbooks in almost every way. However, it has limitations which our SmallBiz is starting to run up against. We need something a little more robust, that can handle consolidation and other things that are tougher to do in entry level packages. I would love to use Peachtree, but unless you are running Windows, that is not an option. I have tried almost everything I can find for the Mac, but nothing seems to be close.
We have looked at online stuff, like NetSuite, but we don't like that option very much. Perhaps we are a little old fashioned about having our financial information on teh interwebs, but the real issue is speed. We have a pretty speedy T-1 connection here, but these things are still very slow to run. Too slow.
So, the search goes on. Feel free to post any suggestions and I will definitely check them out.
It has a good chart of accounts functionality, good controls built in and is generally superior to Quickbooks in almost every way. However, it has limitations which our SmallBiz is starting to run up against. We need something a little more robust, that can handle consolidation and other things that are tougher to do in entry level packages. I would love to use Peachtree, but unless you are running Windows, that is not an option. I have tried almost everything I can find for the Mac, but nothing seems to be close.
We have looked at online stuff, like NetSuite, but we don't like that option very much. Perhaps we are a little old fashioned about having our financial information on teh interwebs, but the real issue is speed. We have a pretty speedy T-1 connection here, but these things are still very slow to run. Too slow.
So, the search goes on. Feel free to post any suggestions and I will definitely check them out.
Friday, August 1, 2008
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.
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.
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