[WinMac] Re: ODBC and Macs

Belinda J. Wagner Ph.D.(bwagner[at]wfubmc.edu)
Tue, 15 Sep 98 09:00:23 -0500

On 9/13/98 1:49 PM, ZMac1@aol.com < ZMac1@aol.com> wrote:

>You can

***make***
> it easy for Macs too.

There's the dig. That word, "make." How many times have Mac enthusiasts
had to use that modifier???? NOT MANY!!!

People should choose the platform that is easiest to use. So, for those
instances where I need SAS and Excel (for Mac end-users) or Access (which
is becoming the frequent choice of PC users over Excel) to dynamically
exchange data, I use the NT platform. Fortunately, it IS still very easy
to port PC files over to the Mac platform.

>There are ODBC drivers you can add to
>Macs, and some Mac software is ODBC compatible.

Unfortunately, SAS (which has the best Mac support of any high-end
relational database product) is not making an ODBC driver for its Mac
version.

>There's also a product
>from August Software (714-450-2450) called ODBC Router. Here's a
>description from MacWindows.com:
>
>"Sits on a Windows NT Server and enables Mac OS and Windows 95
>applications to access any ODBC database residing on the NT machine or on
>other computers on the network. Mac ODBC applications, including MS
>Office 98 Mac Edition,

This would be great if Office 98 included Access, which is not even on
the planning table from what I've heard. Excel is a relatively primitive
tool. The only thing it could accomplish with an ODBC driver is to
extract data from a single table. You'd still have to perform your
queries on the server side with SQL, Oracle, SAS, Access, or whatever.
You could program macros to massage the table within Excel, but that tool
is unwieldy -- having none of the dynamicism of Access. Also, report
generation is crude in Excel as compared with Access.

Belinda J. Wagner, Ph.D. voice: (336) 716-2992
Research Assistant Professor fax: (336) 716-6642
Department of Plastic Surgery
Wake Forest Univ. School of Medicine email: bwagner@wfubmc.edu
Medical Center Blvd.
Winston-Salem, NC 27157

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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b2 on Tue Sep 15 1998 - 05:58:20 PDT