Greetings,

I mad a chart (in Excel 2003 on Windows) to analyze a fairly large set
of scienctific data. The data evolves over time. In such a situation I
like to create simple animations which show how the data evolves over
time. I have done this many times using simple VBA macros. My problem
now is that a colleague of mine uses a Mac and has Excel 2008 which is
crippled w.r.t. VBA. My macro was just a simple time loop that updated
the contents of a certain cell 10 times per second, after which
spreadsheet formulas involving named ranges control what data is
actually plotted. I read online that you could at least use form
controls (but not Active-X controls) on the Mac version - so I made a
different version of my spreadsheet with the macros deleted but with a
slider (scroll) bar inserted and linked to a cell controlling the time
parameter. The idea was to create a semi-automatic version where the
animation is implemented by the user sliding the bar. It works quite
nicely -- on Windows. It sort of works on the Mac - but the animation
aspect (more or less the point of it all) doesn't work. The Mac
version waits until the user releases the control before updating the
chart so that if you slide through several animated seconds on the Mac
the graph just lurches to the final state without displaying any of
the intermediate states.

I know almost nothing about Macs and even less about Excel on the Mac.
Is there any way to get charts in Mac Excel to update in real-time?

Thanks