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!

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.

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?

To make a .pdf in almost any Mac application:
1. In the Title bar, click File>Print

2. In the popup window, click the PDF button

3. Choose a location, name your document and save. You can even insert keywords and the like, if you’re cool like me.

4. If you want, you can preview the document in preview without saving it, or email the .pdf right from this prompt. Pretty rad if you ask me!

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.

I downloaded some videos from youtube and they are currently in flv format. I’d like to put them into a powerpoint, and I think I need to convert them to mpeg, or something. But I don’t know how to do that or what program to use.
Thanks!

I get asked this question all the time. YouTube is an amazing resource until you need to use one if its videos offline or in a presentation.

And that’s where vixy.net saves the day.

Vixy converts flash videos to a few different formats, including .avi and .mov. It’s super straight forward to use:

1. Copy the URL (web address) of the page where the original video is
2. Paste the URL into the appropriate field, pick a format, then hit start.
When Vixy is finished converting the file, it will allow you to download the video!
A few quick tips:
–I recommend using .avi if you’re a Windows user and .mov if you’re a Mac user.
–Don’t expect perfection; YouTube’s videos aren’t that high of quality to start with, and you will lose more quality when you convert the video to a downloadable form.
–This works with any flash site that uses streaming flash videos, like Daily Motion, MetaCafe, etc.
–Depending on the length of your video and how busy Vixy is, conversion and downloads may take a while.
–This won’t work if you copy the address of a page where the video is embedded. You have to go straight from the source!
–Vixy can get a little glitchy; if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.