Compatability

[Scottjo]

Hello I am thinking of going to a IMac for my small office. Will Imac communicate whith my Windows PC and can I share Quickbooks. Is there any pitfalls to be aware of? Thanks!

 

[chas_m]

Yes, your iMac will communicate with your Windows PC, presuming it is running a recent OS (Windows 7 or later). While there is a version of QuickBooks for Mac, you will probably want to run a Windows environment on the Mac (which it can do) in order to run QuickBooks for Windows on it and keep the versions on the PC and the iMac compatible. I believe Crossover can handle this, but you may want or need to just install a full-blown Windows environment using Parallels or VirtualBox (et al).

The biggest "pitfall" of using a Mac in an office is that users generally wonder why they didn't switch years ago, find substitutes for their old Windows software and eventually turn the office into an all-Mac operation, which can get expensive.

 

[joema]

Hello I am thinking of going to a IMac for my small office. Will Imac communicate whith my Windows PC and can I share Quickbooks. Is there any pitfalls to be aware of? Thanks!

Macs and PCs can interoperate fairly well. For portable USB thumb drives and hard drives, exFAT format is best since Mac and Windows can read/write that.

Macs can read NTFS but not write it without using a 3rd party product like Paragon NTFS: Paragon NTFS for Mac® - First NTFS driver for OS X Yosemite - Overview

You have the option on Mac of booting into Windows with Boot Camp: https://www.apple.com/support/bootcamp/

Or running Mac and Windows app simultaneously with Parallels: https://www.parallels.com/products/desktop/

Or VMWare Fusion: Run Windows for Mac with Virtualization: Try VMware Fusion Free | United States

Macs and Windows PCs can share networked printers and files.

The only significant problem I've had is when copying files from PC to a shared folder on the Mac. Using the Mac "Guest" account the files are created with owner "nobody" so they cannot be accessed on the Mac without manually changing ownership.

Pulling the files from the Mac from a shared PC folder works fine, this only happens when "pushing" them from the PC to Mac.

There is theoretically a way PC can log into a non-guest Mac account but I can't figure out how.