Share files between Macs and PCs

First of all, we’ll explore how Windows 7 looks when there are no other machines connected to its wireless network. Find the Computer icon on the Desktop and then double-click it, or click Start followed by Computer. When the window opens you’ll see the familiar Favorites, Libraries and other headings down the left-hand side – double-click the Network link. Here you can see there’s only one computer on this network. It’s our Dell desktop PC called BIG-DELL.

Over at the Apple Mac, click the Apple icon at the top-left and choose System Preferences. When the window opens, find the Internet & Wireless section and then left-click the Sharing icon once. At the next screen, put a tick in the empty box next to File Sharing in the list on the left and then click the Options button to continue. Can’t change any of the settings? Click once on the padlock icon and then enter your administrator password to unlock it.

You’ll probably find that the Macintosh is already set up to use AFP – the Appletalk Filing Protocol, which is one of the most common ways that Apple Macs share stuff with each other. That’s fine – this setting can be left as it is. What we need to do is switch the Windows-sharing features on, so put a tick in the empty box next to the Share files and folders using SMB (Windows) and then click the Done button to continue.

Macs share their ‘public’ folder automatically with other machines on the wireless network, but we want to add a different folder. So, click the little plus (‘+’) button underneath the Share Folders window and then navigate to where the folder you want to share is stored, click it once to select it and then click the Add button – we’re adding a folder called Computeractive. For quick and simple sharing, click the folder to share in the Share Folders column and then click once on the setting next to ‘Everyone’ and select Read & Write from the pop-up menu.

Moving back to our Windows 7 PC, we’ve double-clicked on the Computer icon again and double-clicked on the Network heading as we did in Step 1. Alongside the BIG-DELL icon in the main window there’s a new icon – MACBOOK. Double-clicking on this will reveal its contents – the public folder on our Macintosh along with the Computeractive folder we shared in the previous steps. Here we’ve opened the Computeractive folder and copied a JPEG photo from there onto the Windows Desktop.

That’s fine, but allowing the Computeractive folder to be shared by ‘Everyone’ means that the other computers on our network can also use it. Let’s restrict the access to a named user instead. Back at the Mac, open System Preferences again and choose Sharing. Click the plus button under the Users column and at the next dialogue box choose New Person. Type in a username, create a password and then verify it (for convenience, some people pick the same name and password they use to sign onto their Windows PC). Then click the Create Account button.

At the next dialogue box, click on the username you just created and click Select. Then, at the Sharing dialogue box, select the folder you want to share, then the user name and choose Read & Write from the pop-up menu. Then, assuming you only want whoever uses that account to have access to the folder, open the pop-up menu next to Everyone and choose No Access. Our folder is now shared, but only with this particular user account.

Having set up the account we now need to activate it. Click the Options button again and when the dialogue box opens put a tick in the empty box next to the name of the account just created. You’ll then be asked to authenticate file sharing on that account by typing in the password set in Step 6 – this step provides a useful extra level of security. After that, click OK to continue and then click Done to finish.

Back at the Windows 7 PC we’ve opened the same window again and clicked on Network to see what’s available. Once again, the MACBOOK icon is there but this time when we double-click on it, Windows 7 displays a security dialogue box. In order to access the shared folder we now have to type in the user name and password – the same one we typed into the dialogue box on the Mac in Steps 6 and 8. Click OK to continue.

And here we are. Because we changed the ‘Everyone’ setting to No Access in Step 7, no other computer on the network can use our shared Computeractive folder. By password-protecting it with a username and password we’ve ensured that the folder is only visible to the person who knows that information. There are all sorts of other ways to share information between Macs and PCs, so check out some of the alternative sharing options like Read Only and Write Only – but this workshop has got you started.