I Heart Tech

Valentine Confession: I'm Bi

I know I don't talk about it much - and it's certainly not because I'm ashamed or looking to keep it a secret. As a matter of fact, all my friends and family are in-the-know and if you've ever been to my house, you've seen her with your own eyes. So being that today is a day to recognize the ones you love I think it's a perfect opportunity for me to pay homage to the other romantech figure in my life. My Mac.

About two years ago, I got sucked into the Mac madness and decided to experiment like a girl gone wild. I didn't really have anything in mind for her, I just wanted to add some spice to my tech life. I wasn't looking to replace my PC, our relationship is still going strong - but I thought, maybe we can add a little excitement to the mix with a third party *wink wink*.  My PC brings home the bacon, it's the man in my life; we've been together a long time, we have a groove and we really love eachother - that's not to say there aren't days when I want to ring it's neck - there are DEFINITELY those days! But the Mac, well, I knew she would be my good time girl - always up for some fun - there to help exercise my creative side, listen to music with and really, just available to help me "get away." So without telling the PC what I was thinking, I brought home a Mac Mini along with the perfect couples-self-help book for this new relationship: Switching to the Mac.

With the help of the internet, the book and my personal Mac tech therapist, Ernie The Attorney, the Mac assimilated herself right into my network and has since been just another member of the family. I gave it a prominent position right on my desk, because she's just so pretty and elegant (the PC is relegated to the closet, he doesn't have that kind of sex appeal). And I have them both on a switch box so I don't have to have separate monitors in my small space. I use a regular keyboard and mouse for it because the Mac ones died and I didn't feel like replacing them.

It seems like I'm so busy all the time that it's hard to give the Mac all the attention she deserves. But I had a feeling that would happen so I bought the Adobe Creative Suite for her, just to make sure I had a really good reason to kanoodle with her.  I also use the Mac to backup My Documents from my PC. This is very easy to do since I have do her on my home network like any other PC would be. The PCs (my desktop and my laptops) see its drives and the Mac sees and accesses any of the theirs. I simply use SyncToy to send the files over. 

So for me, the MAC is a wonderful addition to my tech collection. It's been great to learn about and experiment and of course so good to have when a client or a friend has a question about it. I don't use it very much for business purpose as most of those apps are still on my  PC. Of course, there are plenty of people, including lawyers who use it as their only computer and swear by it. I am not going to argue one over the other, that's a waste of time and energy  - everybody, every lawyer has different needs and skills that merit an individual discussion and decision. Besides, why decide when you can be bi? Bi-tech!

Check out these sites for more talk about using the Mac in your practice:

• Ben Stevens is The Mac Lawyer, he'll tell you all about Using The Mac To Practice Law
• Grant Griffiths is The Home Office Lawyer and as a Mac user has many ideas about using the Mac for work
• MacLaw Online is an email discussion group by legal professionals who use Macs
• The South Carolina Bar has a Practice Management page dedicated to resources for Macs

Happy Valentine's Day!

POINT! for WordPerfect (and Apple too)

I'm not one for WordPerfect, having always been a Word user. But I certainly have a lot of respect for it - it's a great word processor, it's been around a long time, people love it and know how to use, right? Well, what I really love about WP/Corel are the folks behind it. Their presence in and generosity toward the legal community is unwavering. I have WPX3 because they gave away copies at TECHSHOW this year and they also gave us 150 copies to distribute to the New Orleans, New Law tech conference. They pretty much rock.

Soooo...last night I was tinkering in WP (yep, another hot Saturday night for me) - when I noticed that there's a built in PDF Publisher in WordPerfect (and also a Publish to EDGAR option). Cool. Looks like this feature is built into WP9 and versions after.

Here's a link to one Barry MacDonnell's WordPerfect Toolbox and a page on Tips for Printing to PDF. Check it out for more details. His site is loaded with WP tips as well as links to "Other WP Sites."

Okay, so I'm thinking that IF you have both Word and WP and IF you don't have Acrobat, you COULD open your .doc file in WP and print it to PDF from there. Tricky.

Are you a Mac user? Then you probably already know that Acrobat comes built into Apple's OS and anything you can send to your printer you can send to print as a PDF. Awesome.

So WTF, Microsoft? Well, check this out. Microsoft has it's OWN version of PDF that debuted in Office 2003. It's called Microsoft Document Imaging (.mdi). You can use it as long as you know the recipient of your files is an Office 2003 user (hmmm, have you ever asked your client what software they have available before just shooting off files to them? Perhaps some communication about technology is in order!) . This is a good option for firms or offices that are all on the same system and you know what everyone has on their system. I've used it several times and it works great. For example, I got an eFax - I have the free version, so it only delivers faxes in its proprietary format - you have to have the eFax viewer to open a file. I wanted a client to see the fax so naturally I wanted to send it in PDF. Well, I don't have Acrobat on the laptop I was traveling with that day but I knew she is using Office 2003; I printed the eFax to MDI. I emailed it to her, she opened it and even printed it. Try it for yourself.

Read more about MDI files at these links.

• Andrew Connell, Microsoft Valuable Professional
• Microsoft.com on MDI