Integrate Macs Into Your Business

Choosing the Right Software

All Macs ship with a boatload of Apple software, starting with Mac OS X 10.5, aka Leopard, the latest version of the rock-solid Apple operating system. Macs also include the consumer-level creativity suite iLife, and a demo copy of the $79 iWork productivity suite. iWork includes Keynote, a presentation app that embarrasses PowerPoint with its superior animation capabilities and more-elegant prepackaged "themes"--Mac-speak for templates. Its smooth integration with Mac OS X's graphics and video engines provides award-winning transitions and on-slide effects.

Numbers, a basic spreadsheet program, is also included, though it can't match the enhanced formula and macro capabilities of Excel. Pages, the third iWork application, is a serviceable word processor and basic page-layout application; Microsoft Office's Word is still a more-capable word wrangler, though the latest iteration of Pages is much improved from its deservedly maligned original. Leopard comes with a broad range of utility software, too, from Disk Utility to such gnarly bits as an ODBC Administrator and Directory Server manager.

Luckily, it's a rare market-leading application that doesn't exist in both Windows and Mac OS X versions. Take all of the major Adobe applications, for example. Photoshop? Check. Dreamweaver? Check. Illustrator? Check. Acrobat? Check. In fact, most cross-platform apps are nearly identical in their Mac and Windows incarnations, so retraining is minimal if not nonexistent.

Also, when a Windows application doesn't have a Mac version, there's usually a close counterpart to be found. If you live in Visio, for example, check out The Omni Group's OmniGraffle ($80). Is Access essential to your health and well-being? The folks behind FileMaker--which is itself available in Windows and Mac versions--have released a new, more-personal database application called Bento that's free, and that might meet your needs. You may also want to check out the Mac OS X section of VersionTracker.com for more examples.

Browser-based apps are 99 percent compatible (use the Mac version of the Firefox browser for best compatibility, though, and not Apple's own Safari). Microsoft stopped supporting Internet Explorer on the Mac in 2001 with version 5.2, which can't even render Microsoft's own Web site correctly.

Speaking of Microsoft, that company's recent switch to the Open XML file format for both Office 2007 for Windows and Office 2008 for Mac has caused a few headaches, but nothing too painful. Macs and PCs can still share Office documents, though you should keep a couple of minor issues in mind.

For example, you'll have no problem whatsoever when sharing 2007 and 2008 files, but Macs running Office 2004 or Office v. X for Mac will need to use Microsoft's beta stand-alone converter to open Office 2007 and 2008 Word and PowerPoint files; a converter for Excel files won't be available until spring. (Oddly enough, Apple's Numbers spreadsheet program already opens Open XML files just fine.)

Microsoft also promises (coming any minute now, really!) an integrated converter update for 2004. Office 2007 and 2008 users have no difficulty reading 2004 and v. X files, since they have full backward-compatibility with older file formats. Office 2007 can even run older Visual Basic macros, a trick that Office 2008 unfortunately can't manage.

Running Windows on a Mac

Suppose you have an application that's necessary to your business but doesn't exist for the Mac, and you can find no close alternatives. No problem: Just run Windows--and that vital application--directly on your Mac. You have, in fact, three different ways to run Windows apps on an Intel-based Mac (which all new Macs have been since mid-2006).

The most straightforward and foolproof way to run Windows programs on your Mac is to use Mac OS X Leopard's Boot Camp Assistant to create a Windows partition on your Mac's hard drive, install Windows XP or Vista, and then boot into Windows directly when the spirit moves you. When you're working in Windows, you have full access to your Mac's hardware, including all of its processors, cores, and graphics goodness, plus FireWire, gigabit ethernet, USB, and Wi-Fi. If you decide later that you no longer need Windows on your Mac, Boot Camp allows you to merge that partition back into your Mac partition without reformatting the drive.

You can also run Windows apps on your Mac through virtualization. If you've been around the personal computing world for a few years, you're excused if you confuse virtualization with emulation. But while emulation used to be frequently buggy, sometimes incompatible, and always slow, here in the virtualized future, emulation's problems have been eliminated and performance is worlds better than before.

Two major Windows-virtualization applications are available for the Mac: Parallels Desktop 3.0 ($80) and VMWare Fusion ($80). With both you run Windows as--you guessed it--a window in Mac OS X; you then run your Windows programs in that window, cutting and pasting between Mac OS X and Windows. Both of these virtualization apps are feature-filled and relatively stable.

The final way to run Windows apps on your Mac is by using CodeWeavers' CrossOver Mac ($60). The good news about CrossOver Mac is that it allows you to run Windows programs without having Windows installed--the programs run right in Mac OS X, just as if they were Mac apps. The bad news is that only a limited number of Windows applications can run in CrossOver Mac, and the list isn't stuffed with many current market leaders. Still, take a look at the Compatibility section of the CodeWeavers Web site to see if it might meet your needs. You should check it every few weeks, since the list receives regular updates.