USB Flash Drives

If I want to save a powerpoint presentation from my mac onto a flash drive but then want to show it on a windows pc, will I just be able to plug it into the windows pc and be able to open the file etc OK?

G'day Liam,

If you create a PowerPoint Presentation on your Mac and wish to show it off on a PC, the usb drive is just the messenger and you have nothing to worry about. Good Luck with the presentation!

Just make sure your usb drive is formatted for FAT32. If it gets formatted for NTFS (the native Windows filesystem), you won't be able to write to it from your Mac. And if it's formatted for Mac OS Extended (the native OS X filesystem), the PCs won't be able to read it.

Just out of curiosity Todd, can you format a USB drive for FAT32 from both OS's?

Yes. Simplified instructions for newbies (you know all of this already, Pulse-8):

1. Plug the USB drive into the Mac.

2. Copy any files on the USB drive into a folder on your desktop; the next few steps will erase everything on the drive.

3. Click on the blue magnifying glass in the top right corner of your desktop; this is Spotlight. In the box that opens, type Disk Utility. When the menu appears, click on Disk Utility under "Applications."

4. Choose the USB drive from the list on the left.

5. Choose "Erase" from the list of choices across the top of the right part of the window.

6. Choose "MS-DOS filesystem" (or something like that, can't remember exactly).

This will erase everything on the drive and format it for FAT32. Now you can both read & write to the USB drive from a Windows machine and a Mac OS X machine.

edit: Duh, that doesn't really answer your question Pulse-8. You can also format it as FAT32 from a Windows machine quite easily. It doesn't matter whether you format it from the Mac or from the PC, it's still FAT32 and compatible with both systems.

Thanks for your help guys