The beauty of life in the Era of Switchers is that most of the big-boy programs are available in nearly identical versions for both the Mac and Windows. Microsoft Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint; Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign; iTunes; Quicken; Web browsers; and many other programs are available for both systems. Sometimes you have to buy the Mac version separately; sometimes it comes in the same package.
The best part: The documents you create with the Mac versions are generally identical in format to the ones created in Windows. A Microsoft Word document, for example, requires no conversion when transferred from a Mac to a PC or vice versa. It is what it is—a .doc or .docx file.
Same thing with Excel spreadsheets (.xls), PowerPoint slideshows (.ppt), Photoshop documents (.psd), and on and on. You may occasionally encounter a tiny formatting difference—a line thickness change, a movie file that requires a plug-in—but most documents open flawlessly when moved between Macs and PCs. (Chapter 7 offers more detail on finding Mac versions of your favorite PC programs.)
But even if switching to the Mac versions of your programs is relatively easy, learning how Mac programs in general operate may require some study. As this chapter will make clear, the relationship between programs and their documents differs in several substantial ways from the way things work in Windows.
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