Melissa asks:

Do you know if there’s a Microsoft Pub­lisher ver­sion for mac? i know they have office.…(working on a newslet­ter that’s done in pub­lisher, for now any­way, but I have my mac)

Unfor­tu­nately there isn’t any easy way to con­vert a Microsoft Pub­lisher file to some­thing that you can edit on your Mac. You can point fin­gers at Microsoft for releas­ing a pro­gram that is so pro­pri­etary that noth­ing else sup­ports it (our vote!), or you can blame Apple for not try­ing to sup­port a some­what pop­u­lar pro­gram on their plat­form. Either way, you’ve got a file you can’t open now that you’ve switched to your Mac. Here’s a few options:

• If you still have access to the Win­dows com­puter with Pub­lisher on it, you export/save as from Pub­lisher as a Word doc­u­ment which will then be able to be opened by var­i­ous pro­grams on your Mac (i.e. Microsoft Word for Mac, Apple’s Pages, OpenOf­fice, etc). You’ll most likely lose some for­mat­ting but at least the con­tents of your doc­u­ment are there to be edited.
• Again, assum­ing you still have access to the Win­dows com­puter with Pub­lisher on it — You could take a screen­shot on your Win­dows com­puter of the var­i­ous graphic ele­ments (i.e. logos, graphs, funky text) and then copy and paste the text into one of the pro­grams men­tioned above and rebuild your document.
• Appar­ently, though we’ll have to say we haven’t tried this our­selves, using an old ver­sion of Adobe’s Page­maker for Win­dows you can open the Pub­lisher file, save it as an Adobe InDe­sign file which will then be use­able by Adobe InDe­sign for Mac. We don’t rec­om­mend this route unless you already have the pro­grams as they are quite expen­sive and unless the doc­u­ment is going to gen­er­ate or save you a bunch of money (or if your time is worth a lot of money?), it’s not worth pur­su­ing this route.

Unfor­tu­nately that’s the best we could come up with. Any­one else have any good sug­ges­tions or things that have worked for you?

So my older brother down­loaded some mali­cious soft­ware on my parent’s iMac. Boom: com­puter doesn’t work. My dad took it to the local Mac fix-it shop and they said they couldn’t revive it. For the record, he was using Win­dows through Boot Camp when he down­loaded said software.

Mac’s don’t get viruses in their native OS (although there is a Tro­jan Horse or two out there), but if you use Boot Camp to run Win­dows on a Mac, the Win­dows par­ti­tion is vul­ner­a­ble to mali­cious Win­dows software.

I’m com­pletely ready to trash the Win­dows par­ti­tion and start from scratch, but hope­fully I don’t have to for­mat the Mac par­ti­tion… UGH!

So my week­end chal­lenge is to suc­ceed where Neural Net could not and get this machine work­ing again, hope­fully with as few (data) casu­al­ties as pos­si­ble. If you have any advice or well-wishes, leave it in the comments!

Update: It took me 10 min­utes to fix the prob­lem. The only casu­alty was my bro’s pirated movie/music col­lec­tion. You can imag­ine how bad I feel about that…

Keith asks:

My Win­dows XP PC kicked the bucket, but its hard drive is fine. I bought an iMac; how do I get my doc­u­ments from my PC’s hard drive to my new Mac?

You could net­work your PC and iMac, but your PC is fried. I rec­om­mend buy­ing a 3.5 inch hard drive enclo­sure that has a USB or FireWire inter­face on it. Take the hard drive out of your PC, install it in the enclo­sure and attach it to your iMac. Voila! There’s your hard drive! You can copy what­ever impor­tant doc­u­ments you have to your Mac.

This process is extremely easy; don’t get intim­i­dated by the task of doing surgery on your old PC. Look on the bright side: you don’t have to put any­thing back together!

Once you’re done, for­mat the hard drive using Disk Util­ity (it hides in Applications>Utilities) and you can use it as extra stor­age on your Mac.

*Note: Make sure your hard drive is com­pat­i­ble with the enclo­sure! Most desk­tops man­u­fac­tured in the last year and a half use SATA inter­face while older ones use the IDE (or PATA) inter­face. Take a quick peek at the cable and com­pare it with the afore­men­tioned arti­cles.
**One last thing: You can do this with a lap­top hard drive as well; just buy a 2.5 inch enclosure.