By Can a laptop survive in the jungle that is Real Life without a DVD drive? The terse answer is no. Ripping an audio CD or burning an iDVD slideshow disc without an optical drive is like finding a cheap tank of gas: impossible. And the wonders of digital media are a big part of the iWorld. So what was Apple thinking?
First, a bit of explanation. Today’s DVD drives are thin, but not Air thin. In order to create the stunning Air design with truly revolutionary dimensions, Apple’s engineers had to leave out the drive. However, if you own a MacBook Air, you have two choices when it comes to reading the contents of a CD or DVD: Go external, or learn to share. Use an external USB with your MacBook Air Some people have no problem at all toting around an external USB DVD burner with a MacBook Air. Heck, half the time, you don’t rip tracks from an audio CD or install software every day.
The folks at Cupertino want you to download your music and movies from the iTunes Store (and your applications from the App Store), so if you follow the Apple Path, you still don’t need an optical drive! A USB SuperDrive from Apple costs a mere $100, and it can read and write DVDs as well as the built-in SuperDrive you’ll find in the MacBook and MacBook Pro. You can also use any third-party USB DVD drive that’s compatible with Apple’s laptops and Mac OS X Lion (they’re easy to find on any online store that sells Mac external hardware). Share a CD or DVD drive for your MacBook Air The other option for installing software or reading a DVD on the MacBook Air is Lion’s built-in CD/DVD Sharing feature. Sharing is an option if you have a wired or wireless network with at least one of the following: • A Macintosh running Mac OS X Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard or Lion • A PC running Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7: This requires you to install a Windows application supplied by Apple with your MacBook Air. You can only read, not write, from a shared optical drive.
Try Microsoft Edge A fast and secure browser that's designed for Windows 10 No thanks Get started. Install Office; IT Pro resources. OneDrive for Mac - FAQ.
You can’t write data to the remote drive, even if that drive is a DVD recorder. (If you’re a big fan of iDVD or burning your own audio CDs, this is a no-brainer... Time to invest in an external USB optical drive.) To enable sharing, open System Preferences on the Macintosh with the optical drive, click the Sharing icon and then select the DVD or CD Sharing check box. Note that you can set whether the Mac will request your permission when another computer attempts to share the drive. On a PC, display Control Panel, click the DVD or CD Sharing icon and then select the Enable DVD or CD Sharing check box. Again, you can specify that permission is required, in case security is a concern.
After you set up the shared drive, just load the disc and select the Remote Disc item in any Finder Sidebar. (Remote Disc appears under the Devices heading in the Sidebar.) Now you can access the drive as if it were directly connected to your MacBook Air. Ah, technology!
Download Baseball Superstars 2013 Hack more. I’m ready to switch from Apple Pages to Microsoft Word and hear that Microsoft just released an entirely new and updated Office 2016. What’s the easy way to upgrade? You’re correct that Microsoft has just released a completely new, completely redesigned version of its flagship product, Microsoft Office, for Mac systems. In fact, it’s a cross-platform release and is new for Windows systems too, along with iPad, Android and Windows tablet support and a completely different way of working with OneDrive, Microsoft’s cloud storage system (that competes with iCloud, Apple’s cloud storage system). The entire Microsoft Office 2016 suite for Mac includes Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Word and Outlook, though it sounds like you might only be looking for the word processor piece of that (Microsoft Word). Unlike previous years when it was priced at almost $500 for the entire suite of programs, Microsoft’s apparently rethought its pricing strategy too and you can get everything for $150 in the Home & Student download edition through, for example,.
We were lucky here at AskDaveTaylor in that Microsoft sent us along a license key for testing and review purposes. That’s my disclosure too, in case you’re wondering. 🙂 To get started with the download, you can log in to the after you’ve received your license key (either from Amazon, Microsoft.com, or from purchasing a license at the local retail store). It’ll look like this: If you look closely, you’ll see that mine shows “PC/Mac Installs Used: 0”. This is a big deal, actually, because for the first time I can remember, Microsoft is using the same license for either platform. With this license, I get five installs, whether I want to use them on Macs, Windows systems, iPads, or my Windows Phone is up to me.
Very nice improvement over the Mac license as completely separate from a Windows license. To proceed, I’ll click “Install >”. Look at that list of “Other Devices”. Marginal Pdf Calculator.
So impressive! But let’s stay focused on the Mac side. You can see that since I am already on a MacBook Pro, it’s default selected “Office 2016 for Mac” as the version to install. A click on “Install” and it’ll download the Office Installer: I found this download to move pretty quickly, but depending on connectivity, it might take you a few minutes to get the entire package. Once downloaded, the installer should pop right up and start: If you’ve used the Mac for any length of time, you’re already familiar with this process. Let’s look at one thing, however: disk space required. That’s shown on a subsequent screen: It’s slightly disappointing that there’s no way to pick and choose which of the Microsoft Office 2016 tools you want to install — in your case, perhaps just Word, in our case, everything but Outlook — but that’s something that can hopefully be tweaked after installation.
Meanwhile, just notice the install takes up 6.78GB of space on your computer. Before you start the install, then, make sure you have that much disk space!
A click on “Install”, a few additional clicks to accept a user license that you’re not going to read (we don’t!) and Hurray! Well, almost. Click “Close” and you’ll have Word 2016 launch, but with a few informational windows along the way, starting with this highlight of updated features and capabilities: Okay, sounds good! Click on “Get started >” to proceed and Office actually starts up: It really is smart to use this account because it makes it absolutely a no-brainer to have cloud-based backups of your documents, spreadsheets, presentations and related. Once you’re signed in, there’s one more step: I picked Colorful – it’s very nice! – and, finally, a click on “Continue >” and Microsoft Word 2016 finally launches. Office 2016 installed.
Mission accomplished. And boy is the interface a much overdue facelift and improvement, as you can see in this peek at a column I’m writing for the local newspaper in Microsoft Word 2016: Huge props to Microsoft for a very, very well done upgrade. Office 2016 feels like a completely new and very Mac-friendly application suite that might just replace Pages, Numbers, Keynote and the rest of the Apple office suite on our Mac systems here in the office. Not to mention on our Windows systems!