My biggest concern about using the new iMac was whether I would still be able to work in my most useful programs and access all my archives.
Essentially this means Microsoft Office.Word is the main program I use for almost everything I do, while after years of shunning Outlook I am now a wholehearted convert, using it for my e-mail, contacts and diary.
Outlook also syncs perfectly with my Palm, my other indispensable device (but more of that later).
In any event, I shouldn’t have worried. The three most popular Microsoft Office programs — Word, Excel and PowerPoint — run just as smoothly on the iMac as they do on my Dell. Instead of Outlook though, there is Entourage, which has all of the same functionality. In some cases it has better aspects, and while some features have unfamiliar menu structures, I did not find anything lacking.
I solved my concerns of access to my old articles and my technology news archive by burning a CD, which the iMac had no problem reading.
I struggled to open and “save as” files but overcame this problem by dragging them directly off the CD on to the hard drive and then opened them normally.
Unlike a few years ago when Macs and PCs were like chalk and cheese, there are no real compatibility issues between the two now. The iMac read all of my back-up CDs and I had no problem picking up from where I left off in Windows.
I tried the most complex spreadsheets and detailed presentations in Excel and PowerPoint and found nothing amiss. While I was busy, I tried several other file formats such as Acrobat’s PDF, movie clips and images without any difficulty.
My final concern was my familiarity with my ergonomic keyboard. After years of using this, a flat keyboard feels to me like the curvaceous ergonomic one does to those who try it for the first time. But I plugged the keyboard in and it worked instantly. The only lingering obstacle was getting used to the configuration (a problem I also struggled with on the white Apple keyboard). The Apple key, which approximates to the control key on a Windows keyboard, is really the Windows key. It took me a few days to get used to this.
Unfortunately there are other commands that do not have a corresponding keyboard shortcut, not least of which is the one I use most often: Alt + T + W — the word count.