♬Gone gone gone, she been gone so long
She been gone gone gone so long…♬

Words and music by Bill Henderson and Brian MacLeod, recorded by Chilliwack.

This post is concerned with Clipart and in particular, how my Mac handled the Clipart on my old PC.

This particular story has two parts. The first was a quirk; the second has become a real concern.

Dealing with the first situation: I have lot of digital photographs that I carry around on my laptop.  Needless to say, since I now carry my MacBook, I wanted my digital pictures on my spanking new MacBook.

The process to port over the pictures was straightforward – I copied them onto a portable USB hard drive and then connected the drive to the MacBook and told the MacBook to copy the pictures into iPhoto, the photo software that came with the MacBook.

It did a fine job –in fact, too good of a job.  The problem is that the Mac also saw the folder that contained my downloaded Microsoft Clipart photos that were on the portable hard drive – and copied all those Clipart photos as well into iPhoto.

Now my digital pics are intermingled with the MS Clipart photos and now I have to figure out how to get the Clipart photos out of the iPhoto folder and  into the Clipart folder on the Mac or simply just delete them (which I really don’t want to do since it is a large amount of Clipart).  I would have hoped that the Mac would have detected that the images were from different folders and asked me whether to preserve the folder structure.  Oh well…all in all a minor quibble.

I have to say that the digital photos do look wonderful on the MacBook screen, which is excellent.  A nice touch is the MacBook allows you to set up a screen saver with your digital pictures (similar to the Windows screen saver) except on the Mac, it will display different photos on your dual monitors at the same time.  That was a nice twist and a welcome one at that.  Furthermore, the Mac’s picture transitions are well done.

However, moving to the second concern:  along with my digital photos I also copied over all my presentations that were created in Microsoft PowerPoint on my old PC.  I have given many presentations over the last few years and accordingly, there were a lot of PowerPoints to copy over.  One in particular was a Web 2.0 presentation that I presented at the annual meeting of the College of Law Practice Management in September in Chicago.  I have been requested to present this same presentation at the American Bar Association’s Law Practice Management Section’s meeting in Arizona this month.  This particular presentation has a lot of graphics in the form of clipart photographs included within in the presentation. It was created in the latest version of MS PowerPoint (2007).

To my dismay, when I opened this PowerPoint on the Mac, half of the Clipart images were simply *gone*.   I was looking at big blank spaces on the slides where the images should have been.  PowerPoint on the Mac stated that there were ‘conversion issues’ in moving the PowerPoint onto the Mac.

Now I am concerned – I have the PowerPoint on a USB flash drive with me and will borrow a PC in order to give this particular presentation.  But does this mean that all my existing PowerPoints created on a PC will have a large portion of their graphics dropped when I open then in the Mac version of PowerPoint?  The main reason for acquiring Microsoft Office in the native Mac format was to ensure compatibility between all my old data which now resides on my Mac but which was created on PCs. I am now living with a degree of uncertainty that I simply did not want or need at this point.

I can’t help but think how much of my data is now gone, gone, gone….