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?

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…

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.