Weird screen height question

I was in an Apple store today and noticed that the 15” MBP could display about 60 rows of excel 2008 running in fullscreen mode with 100%. My 14” widescreen thinkpad t61 can only display about 50 rows under the same conditions using excel 2003. They are both wsxga+ 1440 x 900 screens although the MBP is 15” and the t61 is 14”. Btw excel 2008 mac says the 100% row height is 13 and excel 2003 windows says row height is 12.75. So if anything, the MBP should display fewer rows if they are each higher. I even double checked it and tried it on another 15” MBP with a stated resolution of 1440 x 900.

Anyone know what accounts for this 20% difference. I can not figure out if it is an Microsoft office difference between mac and windows or if there is some other difference. Is it possible the MBP screen is more than 900 pixels height, or the t61 less? Weird though…

I know my old powerbook g4 tibook always displayed more height than other 1280 x 800 pc screens, but then I figured out one day that it was actually 854 height, not the 800 I always thought it was.

And please, no fundamental philosophy argument of why blah blah is better. I just can not see why 1440 x 900 doesn’t equal 1440 x 900, or at least isn’t really close, its physics. Also yes I’m guilty, I did post this in both Apple and the Lenovo so go ahead and punish me for crossposting.

 

Perhaps the toolbars at the top of the screen?? The taskbar at the bottom?? Was the dock hidden by chance? Take screenshots so that we can see for ourselves what might be causing the difference.

 

The dock accounted for about 3 rows, I did hide the dock it to get to 60 rows. The windows toolbar accounts for 2 rows and i hide that to get to 50 on t61. The compairsome was pretty much fullscreen to fullscreen.

If I can get back to the mall tomorrow I will take a picture.

 

different OS of course.. different UI arrangements, different programs... different.... ahh... why is this even asked? isn't it obvious? different program, different arrangements, different size..

 

Actually, it is not obvious to me... Maybe you don't understand the question so i will restate it. What difference is causing excel to display 20% more vertical information in the exact same amount of vertical pixel space. Anybody can see there are many differences like screen size, os, exact application, etc. I clearly stated that in the question. but which one, if any, accounts for the display difference which is the one thing that is actually, well, the same.

As far as why even ask, shesh, give me a break, I'm interested. I have no experience with 15" 1440 x 900 displays and was surprised to see excel display similar height as a 15" 1680 x 1050 display. The other applications seem to respect the display resolution and simply display everything bigger. So I am wondering, is that something excel picks up on to make better use of space, or is osx the reason, cosmic waves, butterfly effect or just dumb luck.

 

Because you are comparing two different versions of excel. I guess the Mac version renders the cells differently, in this case each cell must have a lesser pixel vertical height.