I have had a Windows PC (Pentium 4 wih Windows XP on board) for about 3 years. I am not sure I'd know a megabyte from a flea bite and as a 68 year old retiree I am not sure I NEED to know. My philosophy is that I do not need to know how a tool is made in order to use it effectively. I hope that makes some sense to those of you out there who may be able to help.

I will buy an iMac very soon but I keep hearing conflicting info about transferring the stuff I got on my Windows PC over to the new iMac and still be able to use them.
By 'stuff' I mean...
>>> all my MS Word files
>>> my Microsoft Money file
>>> my MS Outlook Express email files (I wish to continue to operate Outlook express)

I think that's about it for the moment. I hope there are a few answers (in simple english please) for this technically challenged old guy.Cheers...David

PS: At the Mac store they 'hint' that some things can be transferred and will operate, after a fashion...and they want to charge me $200+ to make the transfer.

MS Word files will work, assuming you get the Mac version of Office or an equivalent.

Can't say much about the rest sorry. I doubt Money files will work.

MS word - you can get Office for Mac, or try Neo-Office. Same thing, but free
Money - i doubt it
Outlook Express - I would start looking at using Mail.app instead, and keep those old files as an archive.

You can import all your Outlook Express mail and folders into Mail.app on Mac - Mail works better, trust me, and integrates with Address Book and iCal, all of which comes with OSX.

I don't know anything about MS Money.

And if you prefer the Microsoft Outlook, you can use Entourage - that's the Mac version. We use it at work and it's fine ...

merlinmagic

your best bet would be to buy MS Office for Mac 2008. This contains MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Entourage (the Mac version of Outlook).

You will need MS Word in the 2008 Office bundle to open files created in Word for Windows that have the .docx file extension. It will also open the other document types.

I have used Entourage for the past 5 years and it functions perfectly as an "all-in-one" program for email, calendar, tasks etc. In some respects it is a little different to Outlook, but once you get the hang of it there's no problems. I am not sure, however, if you can directly import mailboxes from Outlook to Entourage.

You plain can't use outlook express on a mac, unless you want to get complicated. Definitely dump outlook for apple mail - it's much, much better
I promise!

Have a look here, and in particular at the images on the right hand side of the page that show you what mail looks like : Apple - Mac OS X Leopard - Features - Mail

Don't pay $200 for them to transfer your files - It's just a matter of burning the old files onto a CD (or putting them on a flash drive, even!) and then dropping them into your new mac.
I bet you know someone who can help you do it (children?)

A lot of your questions and worries can be answered here Switcher's FAQ:

Just from what i've read their isn't Microsoft Money for mac.. your best bet if you need to use it is either purchase a program like quicken or run boot camp/parells/vmware to allow you to use windows on your mac.

Correcto

Except that I think (don't hold this against me) that on certain versions of Money, you can export to other formats. From memory, you can go out to Quicken, XML and CSV.
On the Mac, you would simply import this file and use it with something like Quicken or MYOB.

It's a good decision to come to the dark side (to move to Mac), you wont regret it. We have candy

With Outlook Express you should be able to export your emails into the .eml format and Mail in Leopard will import that. I can't remmeber if you need a plugin or something to help you to save as .eml in Outlook Express. I exported to .eml files from Thunderbird in Linux.

Actually, I just did a Google and I found this free Outlook Express Extractor for exporting .eml files from Outlook Express. Maybe other people here will know more about exporting your Outlook Express emails to .eml files.

I just know when I did it I had some difficulty in importing all the .eml files to Mail so I had to save the eml files in a directory in Mail just in case. I'm not sure if this is because the eml files were exported form Thunderbird in Linux.

I think you'll find any inconvenience in changing over to be worth it in the end. I can honestly say I feel safe using a Mac for my online banking (I currently use Mozilla Firefox for that) . Of course I could say the same about Linux but Leopard is so much easier to use.

There is some good advice on this thread so far.

My personal advice would be to go with adamd when it comes to money. As for word etc. Just get iWork for 99 bucks you will not be disappointed, it is a far more user friendly version of Microsoft garble. If your friends send you something MS garble (rarely incompatible) we will gladly help you get the file. You can run a mac without amy microsoft software.

You will find it very easy.

Get an iPhone aswell, and you will be way ahead of any windows users.

Best of luck with your informed decision. Another good tip is to google (anything you need to do)osx mac, as in : open wintel osx mac, the answers and help is always available.

Plus most of the really cool applications are free. And you can download stuff without virus junk and Trojans...

Enjoy

You can download NeoOffice from the Apple downloads page or directly from the NeoOffice web site.

Welcome, David! I'm sure you'll find lots of help here.
There's a Mac users group in Hobart, who will be glad to assist you: Friends School, Commercial Road campus Hobart
email: dcarne@iprimus.com.au
You'll be very glad you took the plunge and got a Mac. They are so friendly to use, and you'll soon pick up what you need to know.

Check out: https://quicken.custhelp.com/cgi-bin...p?p_faqid=1697

That may help you convert to Quicken files, then you'll need Quicken for Mac: Quicken Financial Life for Mac® Software: Personal Finance, Online Banking