I'm a new Mac user and the crap method of sharing files between users on the same freaking computer is one of my biggest frustrations coming from Windows. However here is how I managed it:
So, there is not one single "Public" folder the way a lot of forum post descriptions lead you to believe - each user account has its own public folder.
So if you save a file under Joe's User Public Folder, then for user Jane to access the file she has to navigate through the finder to *Joe's* public folder, not her own. (Nobody bothers to make this clear on the forum posts which makes me wonder if it was different in other versions of the OS but that's the way it works on my OS Lion).
Okay simple enough except Apple in its paternalistic wisdom has decided to make it just that little bit extra difficult to access somebody else's files by setting up the default settings in the finder so that you can't see other users documents.
To fix that, click Finder, then go to the "Finder" menu on the top left of your screen, (right next to the Apple symbol), click Preferences, then choose the "Sidebar" icon. Under devices select BOTH hard disks and ____'s iMac.
Then open up a new finder window, and you should see the iMac on the sidebar, from which you can navigate through to the public folder of the user you want.
In theory you ought to be able to just select hard disks, but for no reason I can figure out, again despite what all the forum posts say, when I select just "hard disks" nothing shows up in my finder, and so the only way I can make it show the directory tree for other users is to go in through "____'s iMac" and from there navigate to the hard disk, then to the user etc.
Also, just to throw in another quirk / piece of difficulty, even though you would expect the default settings on the public folders to be set up so that the folder is, you know, public, for some reason I found that I actually had to log in as the User whose folder I wanted to access and manually share the public folder. Which is extra super duper dumb.
Granted I was trying to access the admin's public folder, so perhaps there's something different with the admin, but it really seems that Apple has made this whole process unnecessarily difficult. For me the issue is that we have a wireless printer / scanner, and apparently its only set up to scan to the admin account . . . . which I have to try to fix too, eventually, but is again super annoying and I think a function of Mac's obsession with security between users rather than the printer (even though we specifically bought a Mac compatible printer).
