Excel 2001 - font issues in Excel and VBA

I did some testing on Excel 2001 (Mac OS 9.2.2), and became very frustrated with trying to change fonts on buttons in Excel and also the fonts in Forms in VBA on the Mac. No matter what you set for the font (and associated items) on Forms in Excel or VBA for Excel 2001, it doesn't take. Which means all Form text will revert to the System font (typically Charcoal, 12 pt, if they are using Mac OS 9); however, each person can set the system font to one of six choices. Thus, the fonts on the buttons in Excel 2001 all have the same look at the standard toolbars, menus, etc. And that affects the text in the multip-page Form so that it looked like lines on the Form rather than text. I could click inside, make the changes, and it would look like it should - correct font - but as soon as you click outside it reverts to the system font again. What is interesting is that the input buttons (and the text above it) on the input Forms, made in VBA, were all readable and looked like the Arial Narrow 9 pt. Thus, going through each of the Forms, it was readable.

I checked the placement of text in each Form, and it was fully visible on my laptop (iBook 300 MHz, Mac OS 9.2.2, Excel 2001, 196 MB RAM).

I searched Mactopia tonight, and here is the pertinent article: MS acknowledges it is a problem -- their solution -- upgrade to Excel v. X.

Excel 2001 Font issues

This means that the only way to get around a problem that MS acknowledges is to upgrade to either Excel v. X (requires System OS X 10.1 or better) Excel 2004 (require Systems OS X 10.2.8 or better). If you have to upgrade, then you may as well go for OS X 10.3.5 (Panther), and Excel 2004 since those are the latest versions.

A possible work-around (for XL 2001) involves using AutoShapes in Excel as substitutes for buttons on the Forms Toolbar. The font is adjustable as well as other aspects of the AutoShape, and macros can be assigned to them just like buttons.

One other problem with XL2001. It appears that trying to modify a multipage on a UserForm doesn't work. Thus solution is to set up several individual textboxes that can be called by macros to show up. Not ideal, but usable.

It gets more complicated. If you use Excel 2001 in Mac OS 9, and then use it in Classic within OS X, the fonts and alignment seem to change, and neither is identical to XL2004 in OS X. Makes for much more difficult layout and accomodation of varying systems.