ccpbh@nt.sait.edu.au (Peter Hutchinson) (04/28/89)
If you work in a multi-vendor environment one of the things you need to do from time to time is transfer information from one type of machine to another. For those of us with Macs and IBM, the Superdrive on the SE/30 appears to offer a step forward in this area. My initial attempts at transfering data have been less than perfect, and I wonder if anyone else has done any better. If you take an IBM Word 4 document and its style sheet across to an SE/30 using Apple File Exchange the document copies nicely, but the style sheet looks like a document, not a text document (see AFE in Utilities manual). Mac Word then refuses to see the IBM style sheet. I got around this by using Kermit to transfer the style sheet. Mac Word would then see both the IBM Word document and its style sheet, and did a good conversion. Going the other way, I was unable to get IBM Word to make any sense of a Mac Word document. My guess is that IBM Word is not smart enough. Mac Excel has the ability to load Lotus worksheets. At different times I have used AFE to copy Lotus files onto the Mac and had Excel read them, then other times this has failed. I suspect that I could have a similar problem to that described earlier with Word. On one occasion I used AFE to read a 1.44 Mb IBM disk which was about 50% full. I was less than impressed with the time it took for AFE to work out what was on the disk. My tip here would be to use IBM disks with nothing much on them when transfering with AFE. Has anyone out there solved any of these problems ? Peter Hutchinson, Phone : +61 8 2362210 South Australian Institute of Technology, Fax : +61 8 2235050 North Terrace, Adelaide 5000 Email : ccpbh@sait.edu.au