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Percentage of architects using Macs?


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Because the Housing Corporation in the UK, which funds affordable housing, has just released a new form for calculating compliance with certain requirements called Housing Quality Indicators.

The problem is it's created in Excel with Macros and they don't work smoothly when using Microsoft Office for Mac. The person I spoke basically told me they don't have Macs to test on and they've covered most of the market so go suck eggs. He said I was the only one to ring up and complain so far.

I just wanted to get a handle of the actual percentage of consultants who would be interested in having this form work correctly on the Mac.

Of course they could have avoided all this if they'd simply developed the form using OpenOffice.org instead.

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The person I spoke basically told me they don't have Macs to test on and they've covered most of the market so go suck eggs. He said I was the only one to ring up and complain so far.

Maybe the U.K. has regulations & policies regarding anti-competitive practices by Government bodies. Your local, friendly MP might be able to tell you.

If not, ring Mr. European Union. The situation is certainly against the policies adopted by the EU. Surely the Housing Corporation doesn't want to be fined by a billion Euros...

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Of course we don't want to get in anyone's bad books either.

Sage advise ...

in these wonderful U.S. Virgin Islands, aka America's Paradise ... even the slightest comment can and will be used against you by the trusted "Belongers" employed by a bloated, nepotized, racist, and corrupt government.

Nobody wants to be labeled a Troublemaker untrustworthy to comply with their fickle rules.

The handful of Survivors are those who become masters at Flying Under The Radar .

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OT,

I have not been active on the forums for ages for all sorts of reasons, but one of them as been the meta issue, which I don't see addressed is getting real interoperability between CAD software.

There has been an effort to keep chasing ACAD for better imports. It seems to me that this is still not going to give a one to one correspondence of the files. Some things are lost, compromised or "whacky" for lack of a better word.

Since ACAD rules it seems that they are marching to the beat of their drum and VW is simply trying to provide an alternative, while giving import and "flawed" import/export capability. Is this ever going to change or get better? Is this capitalism and niche markets at play?

Look at the implication of this compartmentalization of skills. How long does it take to be proficient in either of these CAD programs? How many do both equally well? How does one choose which one to invest their time and money in?

For a young person who is setting out on a career, which product would you think would be more useful in the market place?

Is anyone dealing with the implication, the meta issues here?

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This is a modern mystery Christian. When I first came to Los Angeles, I decided I would work only for Mac firms using Vectorworks. No source would divulge who these creatures were including Architosh who had just polled the entire US asking the same question. They speculated 20-30% but that figure is high in LA so I think it's high for the US as well...for architects and interiors designs, especially the one brainwashed to beleive that Autocad is the best program in town due to concensual comfort zones.

I successfulyl initiated a VW course in a local university which was termianted three years later because the accreditation board said this does not adequately prepare students for the workplace! What? Autocad wins the sheeples choice award yet again!

The other stickler in the US is that the US arch registration exams are given on a neutral computer platform that is so much like a PC that it's mind-numbing to call it anything else. The application is like Power Cad and is rather cross-platform. This battle has been raging for years now too so I suspect that at some level Mac users are getting their voices heard, me included.

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Christiaan, i'm a bit late to this one but here's my tuppence worth.

we are on macs but generally it's the smaller firms that are. we have 1 pc in the corner as we need it to run the NBS spec writer programme, also not available on macs.

TBH i think the problem here is office, it should work on a mac and a PC.

though they could have tested it.

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I've tried whining to NBS to do a mac version, but they say point blank: not now, not ever.

You'll be glad to know I beg to differ there Chris. They rung up the other day to do one of their satisfaction surveys and as usual we had a moan about no Mac version. But this time, apparently, we got positive noises. Sounds like it might be in the works.

Also, I submitted a feature request for them to support multi-column layouts and at A1/A0 sizes of page. If they did this we could then directly reference a PDF export into VectorWorks and have the spec in the same format as our drawings, which some contractors and building control officers prefer.

They're stupid not to really. At the moment we too have a PC sitting in the corner for this purpose (and one licence on our secretary's Intel-based iMac), but if they had Mac version we'd likely get a licence for every machine we have.

I also submitted feature requests for Mac OS X support (make sure you put it in writing to them as well as on the phone) and ODF (OpenDocument) support.

P.S. actually I need to confirm with someone whether it was Promap or NBS who was ringing up! :(

Edited by Christiaan
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christiaan

MSoffice macros don't make the jump into

Openoffice, if they did i'd be using it

in a flash.

i have too many excel + word documents

with macros that automate faxes, payment

certificates etc, and i'm not sure i could

remember how they work in order to translate

them into Ooffice format. i think i'll

remain stuck in office 97 until something

compelling forces me to do otherwise..

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