#2 Any plan to support "Excel to Graphviz" in mac os x ?

[Chenda Mok]

Hi Jeffrey,
Any plan to support "Excel to Graphviz" under Mac OS X ?
Thanks,
Chenda

[Jeffrey Long]

Chenda,

You are the second person to ask me this question within the last few days.

At the moment I do not have plans to support "Excel to Graphviz" under Mac OS X for a few reasons.

1. There is open-source code included in "Excel to Graphviz" called "ShellAndWait" which is used as an invisible command line prompt to invoke the Graphviz executable to render the graph. It is very Microsoft Windows specific code, and a suitable replacement which would run under OS X would need to be identified.
2. There are also hooks into Microsoft Window to obtain Microsoft Windows' font list. A suitable replacement to obtain the Mac OS X font list would need to be identified, or I would have to convert to a static list of fonts.
3. All the remaining code is written in VBA. Excel for Mac OS X did not have a very robust Excel VBA editor until Microsoft released one for Office 365 on the Mac in October 2017. I do not know if it has all the capabilities which are present on Microsoft Windows, or if the Microsoft Windows VBA code would compile in the Mac version.
4. I do not own a Mac, nor have access to one through a school or job. I give "Excel to Graphviz" away for free, so I don't have a revenue stream to use to purchase a Mac.

Best regards,
Jeff

[Jeffrey Long]

Work to port "Excel to Graphviz" to run under Mac OS X has started. Anticipated release is summer 2020.

Ability to invoke Graphviz within Excel on Mac OS X is resolved, and a solution has been created to address the font list. Excel on Mac OS X is sand boxed, and these restrictions have also been addressed.

What I never anticipated was the amount of work needed to fix the ribbon controls . Ribbon support differs between Windows and Mac OS X, and cross-platform compromises needed to be created. Most of this work is complete as well.

Other work remains to convert to new file chooser dialogs, deal with file encoding (UTF-8 vs Unicode), and address Windows dependencies such as ADODB.

Finally, the current Users Manual will need to be significantly updated to be current, and then a Mac version will need to be created from it.

[Jeffrey Long]

Porting is complete. Version 5.0 released on 2020-12-31 contains the Mac support. V5.0 provides one spreadsheet which works on either Windows and Mac. In addition, the documentation has been brought current, with dedicated manuals for Windows and Mac. Note that the installation steps are different by OS due to Mac sandbox requirements.