A Win to Mac and back to Win transition story...
Introduction
You have to agree Mac's are beautiful objects. Especially the MacBook Pro. It's a beautifully packaged piece of industrial design in a slinky aluminium shell. That attention to design starts when you open the box.
The aim of this article was to describes the transition from my trusty ThinkPad Windows XP laptop to a shiny silver MacBook Pro and to document some of the transition issues, which I thought might be useful for others making the transition.
In the office that I work out of it's amazing how Mac's are spouting. They seem to be the machine of choice for the engineers and designers. A lot of my friends too are moving to Mac's at home. Some of this move I am sure is on the back of the iPhone and ongoing Microsoft bashing. I am the exception that is bucking this trend. And, boy am I getting some ribbing for it!
Having done my research I did make the move from Win XP to Mac. The twist to this story is that after 3 weeks I did transition back to a Win 7 laptop.
At the end of this article you will find an appendix that documents the original objective of this piece: my Win XP to Mac transition. I think this will still be useful for others making the switch from Windows to Mac.
Keywords: Windows to Mac, Outlook 2007 mail transfer, Outlook 2007 archives transfer, Outlook 2007 contacts transfer, MessageSave, Abee, Excel 2007.
Disclosure
I started using PCs back in 1982 when I first started work. The first machine I used was an Osborne luggable which I used to run critical path analysis. From that I moved onto HP desktops, running DOS initially then early forms of Windows. Prior to going to business school in 1990, I invested in a Mac SE30. I have very fond memories of that small screened Mac luggable.
That Mac SE30 was a sweet, sweet, machine. I reckon that my Mac helped me achieve a higher grade point average for submitted work at business school. Documents created on the Mac were so much more advanced than documents produced on any of the early Windows PCs. All that changed when I went back to work, I found that swapping docs between a Mac and Windows PC was such a struggle that I eventually swapped back to a Windows PC. It was just easier.
Things have changed since 1992. There is now a move to more and more "cloud computing services" like gMail. One might even argue that operating systems are becoming a secondary consideration. I think this is the trend, however, we are not there yet.
In June this year, the 3 year warranty on my trusty friend, my ThinkPad T60p Windows XP laptop expired. I've been a fan of ThinkPad's for the last 10+ years. However, I've always been amazed at how quickly after the expiry of the warranty that things start going wrong. In my case the fan became temperamental and sometimes the laptop felt like it was frying! Time to buy a new one.
For the replacement of my trusty friend, I opted to return to the Mac environment. My replacement was a shiny silver MacBook Pro 15 inch with an antiglare screen. With my shiny new MacBook Pro I also purchased a copy of MS Office 2008 for the Mac, a copy of vmWare fusion 3 (virtualisation software) and a copy of MS Windows 7. I had a secondary Western Digital (WD) Hard Disc Drive (HDD) onto which I backed up all my PC data. I also had another WD HDD which became my Mac Time Machine backup device. The other piece of software I invested in was a copy of Photoshop CS4, which I acquired via the Adobe cross platform upgrade (not documented!).
Overall impression Mac
It was my original intention to add to this section. I'll be now not be adding to this section as after a 3 week romance with the Mac, she's been ditched for a new Dell Studio Windows 7 64 bit laptop.
For me the transition from XP to was not easy. I think that MS have reduced the gap between the Mac with Windows 7. I also think as more applications go cloud – like gMail, the difference between operating systems will be marginalised, but we are not there yet.
These are things I had difficulty with and after 3 weeks I decided to reverse the move from XP to Mac:
- Left and right click on mouse. – I found myself still using a Microsoft mouse, so I don't have to use Command click for right click.
- iPhoto didn't work for me.
- Excel 2008 for Mac is a poor relation to Excel 2007 on a PC. The Mac version does not even come close!
I hope you find this useful.
Peter Burton
So what's all the hype about Mac's
Apple and by default the Mac has a great publicity machine standing behind it. There's also the on-sell phenomena for iPhone users. There are also great Mac videos on how easy the transition to a Mac can be such as: http://www.apple.com/findouthow/mac/#anatomy all with a hidden message that suggest Microsoft is evil.
All in all, one cannot deny that the Mac book Pro is a beautiful piece of industrial design. After going thru the transition process, I found the transition to a Mac was just too painful for the basics that I use day in day out. For my particular needs the Mac just didn't work.
Simple things like Excel 2007 on a PC is much more advanced. The Mac equivalent, Excel 2008 is a VERY poor relation in my opinion. There are also some annoying bugs if you use pivot tables that were created on a PC version using Excel 2007. I found myself having to run Excel mainly in a vmWare windows window. The other thing are shortcut key strokes like f4 for the PC version of Excel 2007 (which is used for toggling the Absolute Cell reference.) required manual intervention when run in a vmWare Win7 environment on the Mac. Simple reason is the Mac has a slightly different keyboard layout. There are ways to fix this but I found them cumbersome.
The good news is an opportunity arose that gave me a way of moving back to a Windows environment at not too much additional cost. A good buddy of mine, a Professor based in China is a Mac user. His Mac Book died a few days before Christmas. I persuaded him to take over my shiny new silver Mac Book Pro 15 inch, and he came down from China on Christmas Eve and picked up my Mac. he tells me he's loving it.
On boxing day I ordered myself a Dell Studio Windows 7 replacement laptop. It arrived a few days into the new year. It's not a beautiful as the Mac. It is heavier. But, for me, it runs all the programs that I need. Having moved from XP to Windows 7, I am quite impressed with this new offering from Microsoft. There are some thing I hate. Like the way it handles importing picture from my digital camera. It has gone down the Mac route and tried to make it fully automated. I liked the old more manual XP process.
I had though the move to the Mac would have been an easy experience. For me it proved otherwise. I still think the MacBook Pro it is a beautiful looking machine. It just didn't work for me.
Appendix: My XP to Mac transition experience
Here, for those that might be thinking of making the transition I outline my transition experience.
Just one little health warning
With all transitions make sure you have a backup. NO - Multiple backups. To be safe, to be safe, as my Irish friend would say.
In my case I backed up my data plus other key data such as Firefox profile, Thunderbird profile and Outlook 2007 pst mailbox and archive files, plus a few key hidden files like the account and password file for WS-FTP to TWO WD external hard Disc Drive (HDD).
E-mail option 1: Outlook 2007 to Apple Mail transition
The biggest problem in the transition was how to transfer my mail. I have been keeping annual backups of my Outlook e-mail box since 2000. Each year on 1 Jan I back up and archive my Outlook e-mail box.
All my contacts were also kept in Outlook. I have about 2,000+. Another thing about my address book, as mobile phones have become smarter, so my address book has evolved to having multiple addresses, and e-mail addresses and phone numbers associated to a single contact. We'll come back to this point in a while, as this was the one hick-up I had in my transition.
In transitioning my mail to the Mac I bought a little tool to help me. It was developed by TechHit and is called MessageSave. Here is a link to it:
http://www.techhit.com/outlook/export_import_outlook_mac.html
MessageSave is an Outlook extension that exports your e-mail box in mbox format. This is an amazing time saving tool.
Within Outlook I systematically loaded my archive folders (File | Open | Outlook Data File… ) say achive_2000.pst. I then backed all the e-mail associated with the archive to MessageSave (Tools | MessageSave | Apple Mac Export… | Export Messages…) which turned all the messages and folders into mbox files. MessageSave saves these to your Windows desktop in a folder called Outlook Export and within a sub directory called Email. So having backed up my achive_2000.pst file I just renamed the Email subdirectory to Email_2000. And then repeated the process until I had backed up all my archives. Then it was the turn of my current inbox.
Note when you back up your current folders remember to also back up the Outlook Sent Items folders. Also if you keep useful mails in your Drafts folder, remember to also back up that folder too.
Having backed up all your mail. It's a very simple process to load on the Mac. To see how easy it was to transfer the backed up mbox folders to the Mac, check out this MessageSave video:
http://www.techhit.com/outlook/mac_transfer_demo_video/Outlook-to-Mac-email-migration-video.htm
I can confirm it is that easy. The only thing I needed to recreate were the various rules I had set up in Outlook 2007.
Email: Outlook 2007 Address book to Apple Address Book transition
I also used the MessageSave tool for creating a contacts.vcf . It converted all my Outlook addresses into a virtual card format (vcf) file. This one file contained all my 2,000+ contacts.
I did encounter a problem here. Although the contacts.vcf file is structured correctly, there is a bug in the import process within the Apple Address Book (AAB). The problem I encountered was for any contact where there were multiple e-mail addresses or multiple phone numbers associated with a contact, then only the first e-mail address or phone number was imported into the AAB. I think this is probably an Outlook 2007 to AAB field mapping issue.
After two days of searching on Google I came across an article that mentioned a mapping tool for importing addresses into ABB via a csv file. Abee is available from here: http://www.sillybit.com/abee/ From Outlook 2007 you simply export all your contacts in a csv format and save them to the Mac. In your Mac you then fire up Abee. You then map all the Outlook address book fields to the ABB fields.
The field mapping is not automated. So it takes a little bit of time to match up the Outlook 2007 address book fields with the AAB fields. In my case that mapping process (about 80 fields) took me about 30mins work. Once done Abee imports all the contacts.cvs into AAB. It's also free for one use. Thanks Abee, you made the transfer of my Outlook 2007 address book possible.
E-mail option 2: Outlook 2007 to Thunderbird 3
In retrospect this might have been the preferred transition method.
Download Mozilla Thunderbird 3 to your PC. Then import all your mail and address from Outlook 2007 to Thunderbird. It's a pretty painless process.
Next back up the whole of the Thunderbird Profile. On an XP a machine this is found here:
C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default
All your mail will be in the subdirectory called Mail.
On the Mac download and install Thunderbird 3. Use the finder and navigate to the Thunderbird entry. It's something like:
~/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles/xxxxxxxx.default
Open the Profile. Now simply copy and replace all that files and subdirectories from your Thunderbird PC profile to the Mac.
It's as simple as that... and if all goes well all your account settings and mail will be transitioned too.
There is one slight caveat that you should be aware of:
Thunderbird does not have a one to one match for the Outlook address book. Outlook 2007 allows one to have associated with any name, 3 e-mail addresses and 3 telephone numbers. Thunderbird only imports the first two. So if you have important addresses with more than two e-mail addresses or telephone numbers you'll need to do some manual work adding them back in.
BTW - when I moved to the Mac I opted for Thunderbird 3. I found it had more features than Apple Mail. It also integrates will with the AAB. In my move back to a Windows laptop I have continued to use Thunderbird 3 in preference to Outlook 2007.
Excel 2008 shortcuts on a Mac
The two key shortcuts I tend to use on a PC version of Excel is:
- F4 which toggle the absolute reference of a cell reference. The Mac equivalent is Command t (t as in toggle)
- Alt Return – which is the shortcut for adding a line break into a cell of text. The Mac equivalent is Control Option Return.
Using Proxy Servers on a Mac
In checking out the localised content or country specific ads, within the windows environment I used PuTTy and a set of batch files.
On the Mac, Outblaze's CTO Yusuf suggested Secret Socks as a replacement for PuTTy in the Windows environment:
http://nihilex.com/secret-socks It's a great little replacement.
Photos
Like e-mail, transferring my photo albums from the Windows to the Mac has been problematic. iPhoto doesn't really work for me. The key reason is that iPhoto hides one's photos deep within the library files within the Mac operating system. There is loads written on this if you Google it. Simply put, iPhoto keeps the original image, and then sets up other folders that keep the changes. If you change this it screws up iPhoto.
I simply wanted to have my photos grouped into monthly photo folders and to be able to access them by my web publishing software.
Short-term I have saved my Photos under the Pictures folder on the Mac in a sub directory called my My Photos. I opted to use Adobe Bridge that comes as part of Photoshop CS4 to manage those photos.
One thing I find really annoying is that, unlike Windows there does not seem to be a facility to right click on a number of images and export them to your mail client AND in the process reduce the size of the attached images. This is a huge issue now that jpg images from your standard digital camera can be 2M to 10M range!
The long about Mac workaround is to import the images you want to e-mail into iPhoto and then mail them from within iPhoto. [Not very intuitive for a Mac!]
If you opt to use Thunderbird there is in fact an add-in that will crunch large images before being mailed out.
Web browsing - Firefox 3.5
My browser of choice on Windows was Firefox 3.5. The transition to the Mac was much easier than I had appreciated. One of the things I always do is back up my passwords and bookmarks, which under Windows is hidden under the Firefox profile in the Documents and Settings folder.
Simply transferring the Windows profiles to the Mac profile meant all my user passwords and bookmarks were replicated. WOW so easy.
BTW this is very similar to the process described earlier about transferring Thunderbird profiles from a PC environment to a Mac environment.
vmWare Fusion 3 & Windows 7
Setting up vmWare Fusion 3 and Windows 7 was very easy. I still have one windows product that I am still using – NetObjects. It's the poor man's version of Adobe Dream Weaver. I have a number of hobby web sites created with NetObjects and I don't want to go through the transition process just yet.
I also found I was using Excel 2007 exclusively running under vmWare as Excel 2008 on the Mac didn't work for me. This was the straw that broke the camel's back and brought me back to a Windows laptop.
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