Walter S. Mossberg answers his readers questions on a regular basis. One of Mossberg’s answers caught our eye and might be useful for any potential switchers from Windows to Mac:
Q: I am thinking of switching from my Windows notebook to an Apple PowerBook. My question is whether my years of Word, PowerPoint and PDF files really will work seamlessly on the Mac. Apple says they will, but I wonder if you have any experience in this matter.
A: In my experience, your Word and PowerPoint files (as well as Excel files) will work fine on a Mac, if you buy the Macintosh version of Microsoft Office. The Mac version uses the exact same file formats as the Windows version, and it can read files created in the Windows version without requiring any conversion or translation. Files you create in the Mac version can be read by the Windows version just as well.
Some complex Word and PowerPoint files don’t carry over perfectly. Depending on how the file was created, graphics may not be aligned correctly and some fonts may not be the same. But, in my experience, these issues are rare for typical documents created most of the time by most users.
As for Adobe’s PDF files, they are truly cross-platform. There are Mac versions of Adobe’s free Reader program and its full Acrobat program, for creating and handling PDF files, and they are essentially identical to the Windows versions. But you don’t even need Adobe software to handle PDF files on a Mac. Out of the box, every Mac can read — and even create — PDF files, using built-in software provided by Apple.
I switch between Windows PCs and Macs all day, every day, and find these file-compatibility problems to be nonexistent. Sometimes, I start a column on a Windows PC using Word for Windows, then email the partial draft to myself, and open it on a Mac and finish it in Word for the Mac. It’s just no problem. I get Word, PowerPoint, PDF and Excel files as email attachments all the time, and they open equally well on PCs and Macs.
By the way, in addition to Microsoft Office files, and Adobe PDF files, many other common file types carry over perfectly from the Windows platform to the Mac, and vice versa. These include JPG picture files, MP3 music files, and HTML files created for the Web. None need conversion or translation.
Full article here.
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