newbie

Hello everyone! I recently made the switch from pc to mac. This is all new to me and I have to be honest, at times it's very frustrating learning a new way of doing things. I love the way photos look on my MBP but I really don't care for the way iPhoto works. I prefer how windows worked for sorting my files (photo's). I also do a lot of work with word and can't seem to grasp pages. My work computers are all Windows OS and word/excel for documents. At times I have lengthly reports and when I send them home and I have to open them in pages it just gets to complicated with the corrections that have to be made. Then when I e-mail the document back to my work, i have to go throughout them again. I know there is Office for mac's but there seams to be a 50/50 split wether it's worth it or not? Also would like to know if it's worth it to add windows to my MBP? Any advice is greatly appreciated.

Thank you all,

Dj

dj91 said:

I recently made the switch from pc to mac. This is all new to me and I have to be honest, at times it's very frustrating learning a new way of doing things.

Any advice is greatly appreciated.

Click to expand...

This is the way it is with change. Just got to "go with the flow". With practice comes perfect.

As far as the MS Office stuff. I think that installing MS Office on your Mac may be the best way to make things more similar to your Windows experience environment. But...alternatives to Pages are:

- Libre Office
- Open Office

Both MS Office-like apps. for the Mac.

- Nick

Since you deal with Microsoft Office the Office For Mac would probably be a sure thing.
Without knowing what it is you don't like in iPhoto it will be hard to suggest something.
Nick beat me again and to add to what he said there is Neo Office in The App Store for 10.00.

dj91 said:

Hello everyone! I recently made the switch from pc to mac.

Click to expand...

Congratulations and welcome!

You might find one or the other of these excellent books to be invaluable (you probably don't need both):

Mac OS X Mavericks: The Missing Manual
about $23
OS X Mavericks: The Missing Manual: David Pogue: 9781449362249: Amazon.com: Books

Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Mavericks Edition
about $18
Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Mavericks Edition: David Pogue: 9781449372262: Amazon.com: Books

There are a very large number of word processors and photo manipulation programs for the Macintosh. I can send you long lists of either or both, if you like.

I use Microsoft Word for the Mac all day, everyday, and I think that it is an excellent program.
Microsoft Office for Mac | Office For Mac

However, before purchasing Microsoft Office for your Mac, I recommend trying this free clone of Office (since it's free):

LibreOffice (free)
Home | LibreOffice - Free Office Suite - Fun Project - Fantastic People

If you want a powerful commercial word processor, that's not as expensive as Word, but which won't have the learning curve for you that Pages has, you might want to check out:

Nisus Writer Pro ($70)
Nisus Writer Pro - Powerful Word Processor for Mac OS X

There are so many photo manipulation programs for the Macintosh, it's hard to know where to begin to make suggestions. These are a few user favorites:

Graphic Converter ($40)
Lemke Software: Image Editing, Slideshow, Browser, Batch Conversion, Metadata and more on your Mac

Pixelmator ($30)
Pixelmator

Photoshop Elements ($90)
Amazon.com: Adobe Photoshop Elements 12 for Mac [Download]: Software
(a very popular version of Photoshop for non-professionals)

Gimp/Gimpshop (free)
GIMP on OS X
Gimpshop | The Free Photoshop Alternative
(both are the same program, but Gimpshop has an interface more like Photoshop)

I can make other suggestions if the none of the above suit your needs.

Advice

Wow, thanks for the advice. Going to try some of these and see what I can do. I'm thinking the more I'm on it and use the MBP the more I'll figure and get used to. The hard part will be the fact I still use the windows platform for work. So it's always going to be there. I'll just have to get used to switching back and forth. Again, thanks for your inout........

Dj

dj91 said:

The hard part will be the fact I still use the windows platform for work.

Click to expand...

What do you think 90% or more of Mac Users have faced since the 1980's/1990's??

Windows at work...Mac at home...bilingual.

- Nick

I would recommend not "falling back" to installing Windows on your Mac, at least not at this point. I concur with others that if you're using Word constantly at work, it may be wise to get MS Office for Mac, particularly if your work has an "Office 365" subscription you can join in on -- that would likely entitle you to install MS Office on your Mac and/or iPad at no cost. Alternatively, LibreOffice as mentioned is a "good enough" and free option. Pages is *phenomenal* in my view but constantly having to translate to the work PC is probably too much inconvenience.

As for iPhoto, I'm something of an expert on it and can help you if you have any questions. The key thing to understand about iPhoto is that it keeps its own database of pictures, which you not only do not need to manage -- you should not manage! Using its own database internally, iPhoto can present your pictures to you *any way you want* but it is VERY dependent on that database to do its magic -- this is a big change from the "user must organize, maintain and manage pictures" approach using Windows, and actually a LOT less work if you can grasp the concept. You can optionally choose to micro-manage your images if you really prefer it with iPhoto, but then it becomes important not to ever much about with the pictures once organized, as iPhoto is using references to know where they are and if you move them ...

There are other options, but most of the good ones use a similar approach (Lightroom, Aperture). Picasa and ACDSee take a very PC-esque "you manage things" approach, but in the former case I have no interest in joining Google+ (which appears to be mandatory with Picasa), and in the latter case though I really like ACDSee (and used to work for them!), I decided that for myself the "vault" approach of iPhoto/Aperture/Lightroom worked best for me.

I really don't care for the way iPhoto works.

Click to expand...

As chas says, how would you like iPhoto to work for you?

OS X Mavericks/Boot Camp/Parallels

I am also a convert from a Windows machine to a MacBook Pro and have used Boot Camp and Parallels. I currently use Boot Camp with Windows 7 and Office 2010 and have had no problems. Thought that Parallels was the best until it was no longer recognized on my hard drive. Parallels support could not retreive the information. Luckily I had a back up of all files. Created a Boot Camp partition re-installed Windows and Office (and all of my other Windows based programs) and haven’t had any problems in over two years. Just need to reboot going back and forth between them. The MacBook Pro runs Windows better than any of the PC’s I have owned.

I also particularly do not like iPhoto (have been on Mac for less than 2 years before that 17 years on Windows). I have decided to not import any pictures in iPhoto anymore and now just put them neatly in folders on my hard drive.


I think I used iPhoto 3 times in these 2 years and for me it has no real added value, it might have for others though.

actually you just did.

I like iPhoto because it not only lets me store photos, but also organize them into albums that can be synced to devices easily, edit and touch them up, and share them to Facebook directly from the interface. It also makes it easy to transfer photos from my Photostreams. These features may not matter to you, but if they do, one thing you can do to get used to iPhoto is to think of it as your more traditional Pictures folder. Instead of a folder though, it's an app. All your pictures are still there grouped by Event or "folder" and you can still drag and drop them any other places you need them. You can still move photos from one Event to another if you want yet still create albums for different uses. It basically works exactly the way iTunes works with music files. Sure, you can just play all your music files directly from their folders, but the interface lets you organize them and do more with them.

I agree with member "Oneironaut". And I'll also add that iPhoto is great to use especially if you own an iPhone and or an iPad. I can take photos with my iPhone and attach it to my iMac and iPhoto will import them into my library.

You can also do light editing on your photos with iPhoto which comes in handy before uploading them to a digital photo processing service to make prints.

osxx said:

Since you deal with Microsoft Office the Office For Mac would probably be a sure thing.

Click to expand...

I would say that Office for Mac is the best option. As far as being a "sure thing" that has not been true in my experience. There are still formatting issues when saving back and forth. I deal mostly with Excel, and my sense is that it's not quite as bad for Word.