Merry Christ­mas new Mac own­ers! And a spe­cial extra treat for any of you that are switch­ing from Win­dows to your first Mac. Don McAl­lis­ter at Screen­cast­sOn­line has made a free episode of his pop­u­lar video pod­cast avail­able specif­i­cally for switch­ers. Click here to check it out.

And if you find it inter­est­ing and help­ful, I’d highly rec­om­mend you look into becom­ing a full fledged mem­ber of Don’s com­mu­nity. Lots of great tuto­ri­als and infor­ma­tion to help you on your way to becom­ing a Mac genius!

MacZot.com is a site that fea­tures daily deals related to Mac soft­ware. Today they’ve got a deal going on what looks to be a great lit­tle tutorial/manual for switch­ing from Win­dows to a Mac: mac­ZOT » “It’s About Time to Learn the Switch to Mac.”

It’s About Time to Learn the Switch to Mac®” is the most inno­v­a­tive learn­ing tool ever cre­ated for “switch­ers.” It’s all about teach­ing you the Mac by con­nect­ing the dots to Win­dows equiv­a­lents. When the instruc­tor, Saied, teaches you one of the more than 30 lessons on the Mac, you can then instantly try it on the vir­tual Mac that’s built into the learn­ing tool–an inter­ac­tive expe­ri­ence unique to “It’s About Time.”

It’s com­pat­i­ble with Mac and Win­dows so you can check it out even if you’re just think­ing about switch­ing to a Mac.

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?

Portable Doc­u­ment For­mat, or .pdf, is my favourite file­type to send to oth­ers when I want to show them a doc­u­ment, and I care about for­mat­ting, file­size and com­pat­i­bil­ity. Your Mac comes with Pre­view, and Win­dows users can down­load a mul­ti­tude of .pdf read­ers like Foxit Reader and Acro­bat to read .pdf’s.

Click here to con­tinue read­ing about how to cre­ate your PDF’s with­out using Acrobat