Now that I'm retired, I can rid myself of win based computers. However, in doing so, I need to be able to use existing files on the mac.

I believe that word, powerpoint, excel files can be opened and used on the mac (pages, keynote, numbers). My files aren't very sophisticated (ie - no pivot tables in excel, no fancy formatting in powerpoint, etc). But the content is valuable. Any concerns? Am I going to need to buy office for mac? (that will add about $200 to the transition cost so hoping to avoid).

The biggest question I have is w/ onenote. the interwebz seem to suggest that this will be challenge unlike word/excel/powerpoint. Any suggestions? What should I export my onenote to in order to use it on the mac (and which app on the mac would i use to import)? Free app would be nice but would consider an inexpensive paid app (must be a brand name company). Otherwise, I may look at the hard way - copy/paste my onenote stuff into a word doc. it'll take forever but i'm retired....

I asked Copilot - because your question is perfect for AI:

You're on the right track. If your Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files are pretty basic, **Pages, Numbers, and Keynote on the Mac will open and edit them just fine**. You might lose some formatting here and there (especially with PowerPoint), but for simple content, it’s not a big deal. No need to shell out $200 for Office unless you’re doing heavy-duty stuff.

**OneNote is the tricky part.** The Mac version is stripped down compared to Windows, and syncing can be flaky. If you’re trying to move away from Microsoft altogether, here are a few options:

- **Apple Notes** – Already built into macOS. Free, fast, and decent for basic note-taking. You can drag in images, files, and even audio. Not great for organizing big notebooks, though.
- **Evernote** – Solid alternative. Free tier is usable, paid version adds more features. Syncs across devices, has web clipping, OCR, etc.
- **Notion** – More of a productivity tool than just notes. Free for personal use. Great if you want to organize things with databases, links, and tasks.
- **Joplin** – Free, open-source, and privacy-focused. Good for importing/exporting notes. Might take a little setup.

If you want to move your OneNote content, you’ll probably have to go the manual route—copy/paste into Word or export as PDFs. There’s no clean “import to Apple Notes” option. Tedious, yeah, but doable if you’ve got time.

Bottom line: **you don’t need Office for Mac unless you’re doing complex stuff**, and **OneNote is the only real headache**. If you’re retired and not tied to Microsoft anymore, there are plenty of free or cheap options that’ll get the job done.

Microsoft Office subscription is available and ideal. $9 per month IIRC.

Thanks! Trying to avoid msft as much as possible henceforth. So, subscription is especially unpalatable.

Good to know about the office stuff - should be mostly painless. I'll go through the one time pain for onenote, lesson learned to not invest in proprietary formats. I'll plan to copy into Word (and use Pages on the mac) and organize stuff using folder structures at the filesystem level rather then w/in an app. But I'll look into evernote (free version); Pages likely sufficient though.

One more thing came up - outlook contacts, calendar and email but I guess i can use the browser interface until i can figure out how to import into the apple apps (Contacts, Calendar).

Export Contacts as CSV, import into Apple Contacts/ iCloud.

Export Calendar as .ics and import into Apple Calendar.

LibreOffice is free and will handle most of your word, excel, etc. files.

I think Apple Stores do Windows>Mac data transfers for you as a service. Do you have one nearby?

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Originally posted by sigmonkey:
Export Contacts as CSV, import into Apple Contacts/ iCloud.

Export Calendar as .ics and import into Apple Calendar.

Thanks! I'll try this out.

quote:

Originally posted by V-Tail:
LibreOffice is free and will handle most of your word, excel, etc. files.

I'm hoping the macos included apps will be sufficient. If not, I'll give libre a try. My needs so far are very simple.

quote:

Originally posted by PASig:
I think Apple Stores do Windows>Mac data transfers for you as a service. Do you have one nearby?

I think there is one in driving distance. But I think my challenge is more about what app on the mac will read my windows office files, not so much about how I copy files from the windows to the mac. Hopefully that won't be much of challenge.

quote:

Originally posted by konata88:

quote:

Originally posted by V-Tail:
LibreOffice is free and will handle most of your word, excel, etc. files.

I'm hoping the macos included apps will be sufficient. If not, I'll give libre a try. My needs so far are very simple.

I just recently started using the MacOS office applications because they run well on an iPhone, as well as a computer. This isn't a big deal to most people, but I use a Numbers spreadsheet to keep track of my son's high school wrestling tournaments, and it is handy for me to be able to update his record in near real time. That being said, the way Numbers works is not a direct analog to Excel and involves a learning curve. It isn't hard, just a different interface and philosophy. LibreOffice, which I also use, works very similar to Excel, and thus should be almost transparent to you. Like you, my needs are not sophisticated, and as I use Numbers, Pages, etc., I find them more than suitable. One thing I did note missing is the ability to have a live linked spreadsheet in a Pages document. You can insert the spreadsheet, but it won't update in the Pages file when it is changed in Numbers. I only ever used this feature once, so not a big deal to me, but it could be a deal breaker for others. LibreOffice does live link spreadsheets in word processing files.

Good to know, thanks. Anticipate the transition to be mostly painless. I did notice something weird recently (someone else's mac) - it's difficult and complicated to uninstall SW. Like a browser (ie - firefox). Need to manually delete folders / files. But otherwise, looking forward to shedding the win ecosystem finally.

I'll start w/ the included apps and fallback to Libre if needed. Good to know that Libre will be transparent.

As the transition to mac from win continues to look relatively painless except for onenote, about to pull the trigger on the m4 air....

***** old thread revived.

Update: I’ve migrated my last working pc to a MacBook.

The migration of data was mostly straightforward. Data/pics/etc via usb ssd; office to native macOS suite. Brave to safari.

I set up two accounts: one for secure browsing like banking. Will not do general browsing with this account. Second to do general browsing and research, no banking or browsing that requires login and PID and financials (no shopping). Both accounts are non-admin; separate admin account.

The only tedious things were: manually creating appts in Calendar (couldn’t export Outlook). And Contacts didn’t fully export / import. Simple items were okay but items with notes and multiple phones, addresses, emails got corrupted; I’m going to manually correct each item.

The biggest surprise was onenote. I moved to Outline which seems to do all I need. Hope it’s a good app. It can use .one files so it was painless. Ironically seamless vs onenote itself for local data files. And I have no msft apps on the Mac. That is thankful.

At this point, I think I’m forever disconnected from msft sw.

quote:

At this point, I think I’m forever disconnected from msft sw.

Congrats!

Welcome! Once you go Mac, you don’t go back.

quote:

Originally posted by konata88:
Now that I'm retired, I can rid myself of win based computers. However, in doing so, I need to be able to use existing files on the mac.

Your post brought back some fond memories, konata88.

Copying files between Mac and PC computers has come a long way since I first got involved with these platforms. Back in the day, I worked as an electronic assembly specialist. Customers would create QuarkXPress, InDesign, Pagemaker, CorelDraw, Illustrator, Photoshop, etc. on both Macs and PCs and send them to us for processing. A common issue we ran into was related to corrupt/unusable files. Mac files didn't rely on file extensions and would loose their metadata when copied to a PC or sent incorrectly via FTP, including their filetype and icon information. PC files didn't rely on separate resource folk files so the file extension was needed. What most folks didn't know at the time was it was possible to rebuild the resource folk files using appleScript. It was one of the first projects I was involved with when I was moved into the desktop publishing area. It saved a lot of time and money because customers didn't need to resend their zip/Syquest/Optical drives.

quote:

Originally posted by 911Boss:
Welcome! Once you go Mac, you don’t go back.

I have a love/hate relationship with both platforms.

quote:

Originally posted by konata88:

I did notice something weird recently (someone else's mac) - it's difficult and complicated to uninstall SW.

There is a FREE app for that. AppCleaner will search your system and find all files related to the program that you want to get rid of. Straightforward, easy to use. Did I mention that it's free?