Probable switcher questions

I am leaning towards buying either the 17 or 20 inch iMac and after searching throught these forums for a few days, I have some questions.

1. I have an external hard drive on my PC that holds all of our music and pictures. Will I be able to plug this into the iMac and transfer everything over easily?

2. Is there a way to open and/or edit MS Word, Excel and powerpoint without buying Office?

3. Is there a decent word processor included without buying an extra program?

I think that is about it. I went to the local Apple store and played around with the iMacs and am excited about picking one up.

Thanks in advance.

First off, congrats on making the right move and thinking about purchasing a Mac.

1. Yes, it should all transfer over flawlessly.

2. Yes, you can get the freeware program, Neo Office <--Link to download page.

3. No, for whatever reason there is no good word processor, there is a text edit program similar to Notepad in Windows, but Neo Office will work for that stuff.

Good luck.

An alternative to Neo Office is OpenOffice 2, again this will handle all your Office files (word, excel, rtf etc).

1) Should work fine, did for me

2) You can use Open Office or Neo Office, but I highly recommend buying Microsoft Office (or less you just use it for notes etc), because it is a complete package and works fantastically. Of course that is my view from one where I rely on a feature rich, working piece of software.

3) Nothing included apart from a trial of iWork and of Office 2004, it has Text Edit which I like but I downloaded Smultron which is great for editing php and html because it has built in syntax and line numbering, oh and it has search (instant search built in)

Yea I just got NeoOffice very impressed with it so far

Zoolook said:

An alternative to Neo Office is OpenOffice 2, again this will handle all your Office files (word, excel, rtf etc).

Click to expand...

Isn't Neo Office based off of OpenOffice, but designed to run under the Mac OSX GUI, instead of needing X11?

You may need a better answer for question 1. Let us know which version of Windows you're using and what disk format or version you're using if you know. I'm thinking that OS X can read any Windows format, but am not sure about the latest XP format. I think the limit I'm thinking of a a write issue, not a read issue. If someone knows, please speak up.

I just transfered over all my music and pics from an XP pc to a macbook with no problems using an external HD.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/switch/howto/dvd.html

xstep said:

You may need a better answer for question 1. Let us know which version of Windows you're using and what disk format or version you're using if you know. I'm thinking that OS X can read any Windows format, but am not sure about the latest XP format. I think the limit I'm thinking of a a write issue, not a read issue. If someone knows, please speak up.

Click to expand...

I currently have Windows 2000 pro on a 4-5 year old Dell machine. I think my external hard drive is NTFS but it may be FAT32 (can't remeber and it is currently at home.)

After reading as much info as I can on the iMac, I am still wondering what programs I will need extra if any. I am not a heavy home user. Mostly family pics and music at home and very little office program use. I would also like to be able to rip some home movies into the Mac which seems like it will be fairly easy to do.

Thanks again for the help.

NeoOffice is the Mac OS X version of Open Office, so no X11 needed.

For MS-Office compatible word processing also check out Abiword, www.abisource.com. This is an excellent open source freeware word processor that reads and writes MS-Word formatted files.

I transferred all my photos, music and documents from Windows to Mac about 5 months ago, and it went very smoothly. You should not have any troubles.