Moving Documents from PC to Mac

[PowerBook-G5]

Ok, so I bought my MacBook Pro a few moths ago, and moving my files was fine. But, I didn't have any Word, Powerpoint, or Excel documents. Now my parents are going to move from a PC to an iMac soon. My mother wants to make sure that her hundreds of Word, Powerpoint, and Excel documents will be transferred without any of them getting messed up. Is there anything that she should do in order to transfer them, or should we just put them on a hard drive and transfer to the Mac? And BTW, the Transfer Assistant program doesn't work on our home PC, I tried it when I got my Mac.

 

[jdechko]

If you want to be able to open and edit Office documents, you will need some sort of Office software. Microsoft Office, Libre Office and iWork are all pretty good choices, but MS Office, while more expensive, may provide the greatest fidelity to the original documents.

As far as actually transferring them, depending on the number and size of the documents, Dropbox may be a good choice.

Sign up for an account (This is a referral link, meaning that we'll both get an extra 500MB of space).

Install the dropbox client on the PC.

Copy or move the files into the dropbox folder and let them sync.

When your parents get the new iMac, just install the dropbox client and log in. Your files will automatically download.

As and added bonus, Dropbox functions as a basic backup/ versioning system, so you don't have to worry about accidentally deleting a document.

The free account is limited to 2GB to start, but the referral link will get you an extra 500MB. Invite some friends, link with facebook and/or twitter and upload some photos to "earn" additional free space. It's pretty easy to get 10+ GB of space in no time.

 

[benwiggy]

Depending on the number and size of the files, a usb flash drive, formatted on the Windows PC, should be fine to copy stuff over.

 

[hallux]

Why not just connect to the desktop over the network?

Open the "Connect To Server" dialog (Cmd-K when the Finder menu is up, or click Go then Connect to Server). In the dialog, type "smb://computername/c$" where computername is the name of the other computer, don't use the quotes. When prompted, enter the name and password of the account on that computer. You can now see the C drive, if they're using Windows 7, the documents are likely within the Users folder, in a folder named for the account name. Then just drag and drop what is needed or wanted. FWIW, this is how I transferred to my MBP from my Windows laptop.