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Questions for when I switch

R

rangerdanger

macrumors member
Original poster
I'm almost there! Sometime this week, I'll be getting my MB. I have a few questions regarding switching over to the OS X world though. First, I have alot of documents for school on my current PC (Running XP and Office 2003) and throughout High School, (They run Xp, Office 2007) and I was wondering if I could transfer, and edit these back and forth between the Mac and PC using iWork for the Mac side. Also, would this apply to powerpoints and excel files also.

Next, I have my iTunes libary and my photos that would need transferring to the Mac. My question is, what would be the best way to do that short of a external HD. Would my 30GB IPOD work?? Thanks
 
iWork does handle Office files (including Office 2007's native XML format) per Apple's web page. But you might just be better off getting Office 2008 since the Student and Teacher edition is not horribly expensive.

And I agree using an external HDD to transfer files. When you're done with it as a transfer device, make it a Time Machine backup drive.
 
Thanks guys!! For the moment, I don't want to spend the money on the Office 08 right now. Rather spend it on the External HD. As long as iWork can handle the files for the time being, I'll be fine. Thanks for the advice!
 
You could use your iPod as a transfer device instead of (I'm assuming) putting the library onto an external and than retransfering again to the MB.

If you want to use your iPod, use SharePod, it's free. I haven't used it in a long time...but I recall you simply need to cut and paste the shortcut onto your iPod disk, and than when you connect to another computer, open the iPod drive and run the program. It saved my library when my old PC crashed (and I didn't have externals).

If you want to use an external, and if your library is big, you might want to simply transfer it to the external and run your music off of that. You can copy and paste your current iTunes library (is it in xml or something?) into the macbook folder, and it will save you some time.
 
Up until last year, I only used Office, but when iWork '08 was released I picked it up on a whim. For the most part I use it exclusively now. I love how intuitive Keynote is and there isn't anything I don't find myself missing anything from Word in using Pages. I never used Excel (my major doesn't have any need for it), but I've toyed around with Numbers a bit, and I can see it meeting the needs of anyone who isn't looking to do extremely complex spreadsheets. All three seem to integrate with iLife pretty well, and that's a huge benefit for Pages and Keynote.

The one downfall I see is having to remind myself to export Keynote presentations as PPT files.
 
Yup, definitely consider Office 2008: Mac since iWorks '08 is not totally compatible with older Office Word documents. I had trouble converting some documents from XP on my wife's pc to iWorks from Word 1997 (I think. Recently, we actually upgraded to Office 2007 for pc).
 
I've been using the free application NeoOffice for several months now and have been able to open every document from my old Windows PC without problem.

NeoOffice is the Mac OS port of OpenOffice.

Try it out, you can always uninstall it if you don't like it. But it's working great for me.
 
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