I am amazed to see that Cliff Joseph writes that Excel Office on a Mac and a PC in 'Inside Boot Camp' (PCW, August 2006), are the same. What about the font differences? The Mac has gone over to Unicode for Symbol Font for instance and the PC has not, so so something written on a PC using Symbol will not display correctly on a Mac (with a recent OSX).

I have now written some 4000+ interactive Excel files for the PC and tried to make them cross platform but failed due to this.

Would a dual boot machine have to have two versions of Office as did previous Macs using a PC emulator? Would a Mac booting XP use PC fonts throughout as well?

Would there be any way of forcing a Mac with OSX to use the old symbol font for an application rather than the Unicode one?

I have been a subscriber to PCW for many years and have always found the magazine a helpful and interesting read. I hope that you can give me some fresh insight into these matters. My experience of trying to get help fro Mac users when you find a problem has not been good in the past.

John Ellis