Using the Mac: crawling

Last weekend I switched from PC to Mac. All in all it's been pretty painless. There were a couple of obstacles that I encountered. 

For example, I almost did not buy a Mac because when ordering software through apple.com the reviews for Microsoft Office 2008 were so bad that I was scared away. Like most professionals, I need Word, Excel, PowerPoint and an email client. However, after reading through other online reviews and re-reading the reviews on apple.com I realized that Microsoft Office is fine for most Mac users. It's just there are problems with Exchange Server and lack of support for BookEnds. If you're using these, life may be bad. The other point made in the reviews is that there are not many new features added since the 2004 version. As I'm not using Exchange Server, BookEnds and MS Office 2004, 95% of the comments didn't apply to me. It took me a couple of read throughs to realize this! I bought Mac and have been using it for a week now.

One issue with Microsoft Entourage is that there's no ability to set the amount of time before an email account times out.  That's kind of pathetic as it's basic functionality for an email client and one of my colleagues has been forced to stay with gmail until we can figure out a work around. In exploring this time out issue, it becomes obvious that there are a lot of people writing about this, but it doesn't show up in Microsoft's support pages. If anyone discovers a work around for this, please let me know. 

Another minor point of frustration is that Skype operates slightly differently on Mac. My woes probably won't affect 99% of Skype users. I use Skype for business. I conference in colleagues from Singapore and India into calls in the US. When dialing into a conference line I'm asked to dial the conference code and press the hash ('#') key. Skype provides a nifty dialpad for this. However, this dialpad is not available if you're already in conference mode (e.g. have another caller in a Skype call). Thus I need to dial into a conference call, enter the code and then can initiate other Skype calls to conference in my colleagues. It's a pain to be sure, but the price is right so it's worth tolerating. I wrote to Skype about this problem, but received a general response explaining that there is a dialpad in Skype. The Skype support personnel did not understand that the dialpad isn't usable for entering a conference code while in a Skype conference.  :(