Helpful Information

Category: Mac Help

Just bought a Mac

Hey Everyone,

My fiance just bought a Mac because she is in school for communication design... I have been, and always will be an IBM guy, because I have no need for the MAC computer environment.

I'm trying to get a foothold on how the MAC file structure works, and how she is going to be able to transfer some of her word docs and music from the IBM-PC I built for her, to her new MAC that she just purchased.

If someone could shed some light on what is involved in transferring the files to her new Mac, that would be great.

Some of the file types she needs to transfer are:

Word Documents
Excel Documents
Microsoft Money (Probably going to buy Quicken for Mac and try to convert her Money file to Quicken)

She will be buying a Zip drive so that she can transfer these files easily between the two computers.

Thanks a bunch!

you dont have to buy zip files to transfare files, just set up an FTP server on the windows computer and connect both computers via cable, that way theres a much easier and faster data transfere

In the simplest case just burn the files to a CD and drag them to the Mac :). Easy as! Sure you'll get the hang of it soon enough, it really is an excellent platform.

I know that it is relatively simple to actually transfer the files to her Mac, but if I understand the Mac world correctly, there will be compatability issues when we transfer the IBM-formatted files over to the Mac environment. Will she be able to open a word document on her Mac if she created it in a windows environment?

If the answer is no, is there a conversion tool out there? Surely others have ran into this problem and considering Microsoft was nice enough to develop Office for both types O/S's, you'd think they'd have some sort of conversion capabilities.

Thanks for your help in advance.

Umm.. not since 1994 or so.

The only problem you may run into is in doc/text files with high ASCII characters. So - if you've got a file with characters like a-acute, e-macron etc (ie: anything coded for by ASCII codes above 0127), then you may have problems since in the dark ages Macs & PCs had different tables between 0128-0255.

So - check to see if she's using any extended characters (say, characters you need to insert using "insert symbol" in MSWord). The good thing is that, if she is, any differences will be consistent, so a simple search'n'replace will sort this out.

The same goes for Excel.

However, newer versions of Office (2000+?) use some unicode format internally and shouldn't have any problems.

but I have no idea when it comes to MSMoney.

Cheers,
Simon