MacBook Air M1.

[STEMO]

She also mentioned Share Point, whatever that is.

[Shackeng]

Wifey says she just put all of her files into Onedrive and downloaded from there. She has a MacBook Air.

I have a feeling Win 10 has pestered me with this in the past. I have no idea what it is but will look it up.

[Kevin Wood]

She also mentioned Share Point, whatever that is.

Run! Just run!

[STEMO]

She also mentioned Share Point, whatever that is.

Run! Just run!

And yet she seemed to have no problems at all. 

[TheBoy]

As long as the USB flash drive is FAT32, Mac Big Sur can read and write fine.  Big Sur can read NTFS (but not write), but its a bit flakey.

I do find sometimes my Macbook (Intel, not M1) can take several seconds to see bigger flash drives.


Windows will format bigger flash drives as either exFAT (which again my Mac can read and write without issue) or NTFS.

Mac I think by default formats them FAT32.


Hope that helps?

[TheBoy]

She also mentioned Share Point, whatever that is.

Run! Just run!

And yet she seemed to have no problems at all. 

Onedrive for Business (which I guess she uses, rather than Consumer Onedrive), is actually a frontend for a bastardised Sharepoint.

Sharepoint, once correctly set up, is a pretty powerful tool, though most people just use it as a (slow, clunky, slightly impractical) document storage system.  Its just a technically horrible product.

[STEMO]

I was informed by Samsung that their cloud service is ceasing for photos and files, all other stuff, phone settings, contacts, etc, would still be saved. I was advised to link my Samsung cloud account to OneDrive, which I just did, and everything moved across seamlessly.
Sorry, Chris, off topic but trying to work out if you could access OneDrive from your Mac.

[Shackeng]

Thanks for all the inputs. I have now copied all my documents onto a flash drive (formatted to exFAT as this was offered as compatible by PC and Mac Jaime). I can see the files on the Mac, but when I try to copy them into Textmaker on the Mac it says it doesn't recognise the Format. I can try again using FAT32 as there are mutterings about exFAT issues with the M1 Macs running Big Sur on Mac forums.
Steve, I can get Onedrive on the Mac and PC and may well try that next.

[TheBoy]

Thanks for all the inputs. I have now copied all my documents onto a flash drive (formatted to exFAT as this was offered as compatible by PC and Mac Jaime). I can see the files on the Mac, but when I try to copy them into Textmaker on the Mac it says it doesn't recognise the Format. I can try again using FAT32 as there are mutterings about exFAT issues with the M1 Macs running Big Sur on Mac forums.
Steve, I can get Onedrive on the Mac and PC and may well try that next.

So the files have copied over, but the application cant read them.  This was one of the things I mentioned earlier, that the Mac apps often use different file formats to the PC versions.

If the files were done in Textmaker on a PC, and don't open properly in Textmaker on the Mac, then you need to contact Textmaker for their fix to that.

If you are trying to use Textmaker to open MS Word docs, well, good luck.  When you get bored, install Microsoft Word for Mac.  Or on Windows, try to save them in a more open format like RTF or even TXT, but this will trash the formatting, and need a fair bit of work to reformat the documents on the Mac.


Switching between systems as fundamentally different as Windows and macOS is never painless I'm afraid.

[Shackeng]

I did contact Softmaker, but frankly don't expect a reply. I have also accessed my Windows files via Onedrive (thanks Steve) but am still unable to read them.
Incidentally, Textmaker opens Word docs with no problem, and as it's free, is the reason I've used it for years.
It seems possible, if not probable, that I will not be able to open Windows files in Mac. Not the end of the world more a pain in the butt as I had hoped not to have to use the PC so much.

[TheBoy]

Its not so much that the Mac can't read Windows files, or vice versa, its more some of the applications that have versions for both Windows and macOS can't read each other's files.  The paid apps do tend to be better than the free ones for this, but still no guarantee.

Incidentally, if you have MS Office compatible files on OneDrive, you can use the (free) online versions of Word/Excel/whatever to read them within the browser.  They have limited features, and can be clunky...   ...but work OK for simple stuff.  This is available even on the freebie OneDrive (obviously if you have the paid OneDrive variants, called Microsoft 365 now, you have access to the full Office package to download and install on Windows and Mac.


Also, if they are MS compatible-ish word/excel/ppt docs, have you tried the built in macOS applications like Pages and Keynote to open them? They open some of the simpler ones without issue.

[Shackeng]

I haven't tried them, no, but will do so.