Many built-in features of the Mac operating system give busy attorneys an edge that's. For that new client is on your office Mac, as well as on your iPad at home.

The Mac Difference: At Your Office Setting up a PC-based law office network, with file sharing, permissions and shared printing is not an exercise for the faint of heart, and it often requires costly consultants (and your valuable time). The same set-up using Macs is often as easy as plug-and-play. Not only are Macs easier to set up and network than PCs, but the ongoing maintenance costs may be much less. For word processing operations, Microsoft has made a Mac version of its venerable Office suite available to Mac users for decades. Documents created on a Mac using Word can be shared, read and fully edited by any PC user with a copy of Word. How to make a bootable cd for mac os x mountain lion. The same goes for Excel spreadsheets made on a Mac and for PowerPoint presentations, as well. Apple’s iWork suite is a reasonably priced, competent, direct competitor to Microsoft Office.

The Apple iWork suite, consisting of Pages for word processing, Numbers for spreadsheets and Keynote for presentations, costs only $60 at Apple’s App Store, compared with $150 for Microsoft Office for Mac 2011. When compared with Microsoft Word, Apple’s Pages offers a much more intuitive interface and increased capability to integrate graphics, titles and charts easily and efficiently. Apple Pages is compatible with Word—documents you created with Pages can be shared, read and edited almost seamlessly by Word users.

Numbers is Apple’s spreadsheet program and a competitor to Excel. Numbers has the same basic capabilities as Excel, but adds an element of readability. With a Numbers spreadsheet, you have the ability to export your data to any number of easy-to-read templates. Numbers can import and export Excel documents seamlessly.

Keynote is Apple’s easier-to-use answer to PowerPoint. In Keynote, building elements in and out and creating motion (both within a slide and between slides) is easy and intuitive. Guides snap elements into place, both on the slide and relative to each other. Graphics are wholly integrated into the presentation, meaning you’ll never again spend valuable time repairing a link to a photo or chart as PowerPoint users do.

With a Mac, there’s more than just the ability to produce Office documents that you can easily share with a PC user, or the option to be more creative using Apple’s iWork suite. Apple’s operating system, OS X Lion, has a number of built-in advantages, as well. By simply plugging in an external hard drive, Apple’s built-in Time Machine program provides you with an automatic, invisible and totally reliable backup of all your valuable data on the hour, every hour, every day. Restoring a document that you inadvertently saved over or deleted is as easy as entering Time Machine, selecting the most recent version, and clicking “Restore!” Should you ever lose your computer, or should your hard drive meet an unfortunate demise, everything can be reset on your replacement Mac. Spotlight, which is integrated into Apple’s operating system, offers extensive search capability with the click of a mouse, allowing you to easily and quickly search your computer.

Spotlight automatically indexes not only the title of your documents, but also the content of every document. In your office, at your desk, the Mac difference is apparent whether you’re writing a brief, drafting a contract, working on a client’s spreadsheet or preparing for your opening statement.

However, that’s not the only place where the Mac competitive difference comes into play. On the Road When you’re on the road, you need your technology to work flawlessly. Many built-in features of the Mac operating system give busy attorneys an edge that’s lacking on even the most cutting-edge PCs. For example, all Macs have the built-in ability to natively print directly to a PDF document—something that requires extra software on a PC. No matter where you are, you can print a document directly to a PDF that can then be shared with anyone in the world.

The ability to integrate your iPhone and iPad with a Mac is also a huge advantage over PCs. With a Mac, your mail, calendar and contacts all sync—painlessly and wirelessly—with all of your other iDevices. This means that the contact information you entered into your iPhone for that new client is on your office Mac, as well as on your iPad at home.

Macs also have many advantages when it comes to taking and organizing notes. All Macs now come with a built-in iSight camera and quality microphone, something you won’t find on most PCs. While this is useful for FaceTime video conferences with friends, it can also come in handy on the road.

You can have a client “sign” a document using Apple’s built-in PDF software, Preview and the iSight camera. Have your client sign a blank page, show it to the iSight camera, and Preview does the rest. SpeakWrite () is available for your iPhone, iPad and your computer, and allows you to dictate a letter, including attachments, in very short order.