Jul 19 2009
Life with Mac – Stuff that didn’t work
As much as I’d love to say that everything Mac is going swimmingly, there’s been a few obstacles to true OSX bliss.
My day to day life includes the businesses that I’ve been running for years (one of them over ten years, the other one about four years). They are established and have fully developed processes that are followed by everyone. While I can adjust some of these processes to take into account my Mac, there are limitations on what I can impose on others.
In a previous post I talked about what worked out well for me. This post, however, is about the parts that didn’t work, what I’ve done to work-around for now and what I plan to put in place to completely resolve the issues as I move forwards.
The first obstacle has proved to be email. I’ve used Microsoft Outlook for many years (and Outlook 2007 for the past couple of years). With this kind of longevity of use I’ve arrived at ways that I handle email (and contacts, calendars, to-do lists) that are dependant on Outlook.
In moving to the Mac I figured I’d just go with Office for Mac and all would be good. The first shock is that Office for Mac doesn’t include Outlook. Instead, it includes Entourage. As this is the ‘equivalent’ program it’s the one I’ve decided to use (for now). At the moment, I’m not feeling very comfortable with my decision. There are so many little things I was used to doing with Outlook that don’t quite come through to Entourage. I’m giving myself some time and persisting at the moment on the basis that many years of Outlook use has resulted in me getting settled in a rut leading me to my current frustration. i.e. it’s not that Entourage is ‘worse’ than Outlook, just that it’s different enough that I can’t just use it in the same way I was using Outlook.
Unlike many other parts of using Mac where I’ve now reached a semi-automatic level, I find myself still having to think about things in Entourage. If this doesn’t show signs of changing soon I’m going to have to start looking at alternatives. At this stage, I’d guess the next alternative will be to use the included OSX mail, iCal, address book applications and see if they integrate well enough to give me the kind of functionality I’m after.
The other part of this niggle is that Entourage can’t import PST files from Outlook. In the end I found information on the web that suggests you can use Thunderbird as an intermediary in the conversion process and this appeared to work for me but ultimately failed to fully transfer through. This is almost certainly my fault – my standard Outlook config meant that I usually had 4-6 separate PST files open at once and the Thunderbird import tries to import everything from Outlook in one go (probably something over 10,000 separate emails in my case). Parallels/XP to the rescue. Just installed Office (which I needed for a few other things anyway) and configured Outlook not to ‘do’ email but to load all the PST files I needed. It does mean I need to load a different program to refer to my old email that it’s not the first time I’ve been in that position.
One aspect of the business is that I keep some on-going KPI’s and stats in an Excel spreadsheet. I’ve been using some of the clever conditional formatting that Office 2007 offers and have found these don’t translate into Excel on Mac so I’m still loading my stats spreadsheets on the Parallels/XP side of things.
While on the subject of Microsoft, the other glaring ommission for Office is a lack of Publisher. So far, I haven’t found anything that’ll open Publisher files on OSX. My current solution is to keep using Publisher under Parallels/XP for now while I seek other solutions. I have far too many documents, templates, flyers, etc in Publisher format just to abandon them all.
My best hope at the moment is that I’ll find a way (probably under Windows) to move the Publisher stuff into InDesign and then go over to using that entirely for DTP stuff. While I’ve tried doing cut/paste from Publisher (Parallels/XP) to InDesign (OSX) without success, I haven’t tried it when I’m dealing entirely with a Windows platform. The business still has this capability and I just have to find the time to check and see if it’ll work.
I haven’t played with any of the iWork suite of programs yet so this might offer some viable solution for this – when I’ve put together the cash to buy iWork I’ll try it and see.
If you know of some other way of moving a few hundred .pub files into something OSX understands I’d love to hear from you.
That pretty much takes care of the Microsoft-related issues. Honestly, I’m very happy that there are so few niggles in this respect.
The businesses all use QuickBooks for accounting. Not that I’m surprised but there’s no Mac version of QuickBooks available so this program also makes it onto the Mac as a Parallels/XP thing. However, given the problems that financial software (be it MYOB, QuickBooks or many other options) have even coping with a normal Windows install I’ve found the software works very well in a Parallels/XP environment so this isn’t really causing any problems. We’re generally very happy with QuickBooks for our accounting needs so I can’t see a move to something that does Mac any time soon.
Aside from this, the only other hold-out that stays on the Parallels/XP install is a poor excuse for software called Catalyst. This is the program that I have to use to interact with the company for whom we do HP warranty work. Even on a standard Windows computer the software is unstable – under XP it might crash half a dozen times or more just doing basic job updates. Bizarrely, under Vista it was actually more stable. Since I’m running Parallels/XP I’m back to the standard level of (in)stability for Catalyst that I was used to under XP previously. It doesn’t work any LESS well though, so no use complaining.
After about two months, I’m now using the MacBook for everything that I was using Windows for (except running my engravers – they run on a dedicated computer just for that purpose anyway so this isn’t really a cop-out) and with few exceptions have found myself using Mac for almost everything.
Generally, I’ve found initial teething issues with understanding Mac and OSX and it’s standard layouts for programs but, once understood, I’m finding the consistency across applications to be really useful. I’ve mostly gotten used to not having a task bar or a start menu (in the way that Windows has them, anyway) and generally find that I’m happier with how OSX handles these than Windows anyway.
Next up, the road to productivity – the little tweaks and add-ons that went into getting my daily use of Mac the happy experience it’s become.
