Week 1: Ditching The PC--Moving To Mac

We've all seen the clever commercials, "I'm a PC...and I'm a Mac...etc." but it is really practical in the business world? I'd thought I'd give it try since I've had a pleasant experience with a Mac Mini in my home and I needed to do some design work with our website--so I decided to take the plunge. Here's a quick rundown of my first week with the transition.

Day 1:
Right out of the box I can't help but stare into the shiny and beautiful display on the iMac. I'm amazed there's only one cord, far from the mess I've got with my other PC's. When I turn it on I'm blown away, the screen is so clear and bright, it's hands down better than any PC display I've ever seen. I hook up my wireless keyboard and mouse, set it up to the wireless network and I'm off to surfing.

Day 2:
I play around a bit with iWork, the Office "equivalent" on the Mac but quickly see that some things aren't converting how I want them to in Numbers--the Excel version on Mac. However, the templates and work flow are interesting and again are very appealing to the eye. I spend most of time trying to figure out Numbers because I use this many times during the work day, but I can see I'm going to need some help (I spent about 20 minutes trying to merge two cells). I've already got a membership to the online training site www.lynda.com, so I start taking some courses.

Day 3:
I'm still struggling in Numbers, but lynda.com is helping me out; after some patience I can really see what the iWork is trying to accomplish over the boring (yet functional) Excel. It seems that the value of tables in iWork Numbers is much more so than in Excel. I think the iWork Numbers group people were trying to create a much more interactive rich experience using this program, much like all their other products.

Day 4:
Enough of iWork, we'll learn more on that later. Let's get things communicated with the home office and really get this puppy cranking--let's start with my calendar and mail and getting it to talk to the Exchange Server 2003. The mail communication was just a matter of plugging in the right values and it went off without a hitch. However, the calendar was a different story--it simply wouldn't work. There's no compatibility (that I could find) with iCal and my calender on the Exchange Server. I guess you could call this Strike 1.

Day 5:
I come to terms that I can't get away from PC applications completely i.e. Outlook. So I find a program called VMWare Fusion that claims it can run things simultaneously and the box I have in front of me looks like what I need. Now all I need is to spend another $300 on XP Pro to load on my already pricey iMac.

Day 6:
The VMWare Fusion installation was simple and to the point. I simply followed the instructions on their website and installed XP Pro successfully. The rest of the day was spent doing a mammoth of PC updates.

Day 7:
Outlook is setup on the XP side and I've got my precious contacts, calendar and e-mail in one place. Everything is working amazingly smooth. Hey it's working just how they advertised!

So after one week, we've only gotten "1 strike" per say. After installing the Fusion and XP Pro I found out that I could've gotten the Office for Mac to get the Outlook equivalent with Entourage, but it would have cost a little more, and reviews online aren't the best; so I feel pretty good about my setup so far.

Stay tuned next week when we really put things to the test.