Documents can take one of several roads between your Mac and a Windows machine: via disk (such as a CD), flash drive, Dropbox, network, email, Bluetooth, iPod, web page, FTP download, and so on.
The Mac is more Windows-compatible than ever. Still, before sending a document to a colleague who uses Windows, you must be able to answer “yes” to both of the questions below.
Most popular programs are sold in both Mac and Windows flavors, and the documents they create are freely interchangeable. For example, documents created by recent versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, FileMaker, Illustrator, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and many other Mac programs don’t need any conversion. The corresponding Windows versions of those programs open such documents with nary a hiccup.
Files in standard exchange formats don’t need conversion, either. These formats include JPEG and PNG (digital photos), GIF (cartoon/logo graphics on web pages), HTML (raw web page documents), Rich Text Format (a word-processor exchange format that maintains bold, italic, and other formatting), plain text (no formatting at all), MP3 and AAC files (for audio), MIDI files (for music synthesizers), and so on.
But what about documents made by Mac programs that don’t exist on the typical Windows PC hard drive, like Keynote or Pages? You certainly can’t count on your recipient having the application.
Do your recipients the favor of first saving such documents into one of those exchange formats. In Pages, for example, choose File→Export; in the resulting dialog box, click Word. Click Next. Now name this special version of the document (complete with the .doc suffix), and then click Save.
Every document on your hard drive has some kind of tag to tell the computer what program is supposed to open it: either a pair of invisible four-letter codes or a file name suffix like .doc.
Microsoft Windows uses only the latter system for identifying documents. Here are some of the most common such codes:
Kind of document | Suffix | Example |
Microsoft Word (old) | .doc | Letter to Mom.doc |
Microsoft Word (latest) | .docx | Letter to Mom.docx |
Excel | .xls or .xlsx | Profit Projection.xls |
PowerPoint | .ppt | Slide Show.ppt |
JPEG photo | .jpg | Baby Portrait.jpg |
GIF graphic | .gif | Logo.gif |
Web page | .htm | index.htm |
The beauty of macOS is that its programs add these file name suffixes automatically and invisibly, every time you save a new document. You and your Windows comrades can freely exchange documents without ever worrying about this former snag in the Macintosh/Windows relationship.
Once you’ve created a document destined for a Windows machine, your next challenge is to get it onto that machine. One way is to put the file on a disk—a CD you’ve burned, for example—which you then hand to the Windows owner.
Macs and PCs format hard drives differently. The Mac can read Windows disks and flash drives (which use unappetizingly named formatting schemes like FAT32 and NTFS), but Windows can’t read Mac hard drives or flash drives. CDs and DVDs use the same format on both kinds of computers, though, so you should have very little problem moving these between machines.
MacOS can “see” shared disks and folders on Windows PCs that are on the same network. Complete instructions are in Chapter 14.
Chapter 21 offers details on FTP and web sharing, two ways to make your Mac available to other computers—Windows PCs or not—on the Internet. And, of course, you can always email files between Macs and PCs.