The .xlsx experience is even messier in a business context. I work daily across Windows and Mac, and my two worst offenders are Excel and QuickBooks.
Excel on Mac has been closing the gap, but VBA macros from Windows colleagues still break regularly — sometimes silently, sometimes loudly. A workbook that runs perfectly on Windows will open on Mac and just do nothing, with no error. I've ended up keeping a Windows machine running purely because of macro-dependent spreadsheets.
QuickBooks is the more frustrating one. Intuit has historically treated the Mac version as a feature-lagged port — payroll features, industry-specific reports, and bank reconciliation behaviour all differ between platforms. The company essentially wrote the same product twice and kept them deliberately out of sync. Muscle memory from one doesn't transfer to the other.
The only partial escape I've found is pushing financial calculations out to platform-neutral layers entirely — whether that's a shared Google Sheet, a web-based tool, or an API. The moment the logic lives in a .xlsm file, you're platform-dependent again.
Excel on Mac has been closing the gap, but VBA macros from Windows colleagues still break regularly — sometimes silently, sometimes loudly. A workbook that runs perfectly on Windows will open on Mac and just do nothing, with no error. I've ended up keeping a Windows machine running purely because of macro-dependent spreadsheets.
QuickBooks is the more frustrating one. Intuit has historically treated the Mac version as a feature-lagged port — payroll features, industry-specific reports, and bank reconciliation behaviour all differ between platforms. The company essentially wrote the same product twice and kept them deliberately out of sync. Muscle memory from one doesn't transfer to the other.
The only partial escape I've found is pushing financial calculations out to platform-neutral layers entirely — whether that's a shared Google Sheet, a web-based tool, or an API. The moment the logic lives in a .xlsm file, you're platform-dependent again.