Mac OS® X Leopard™ All‐in‐One Desk Reference For Dummies®

Chapter 6. Sharing Documents for Fun and Profit

In This Chapter

• Comparing network sharing with multi‐user sharing

• Setting and changing permissions

• Sharing documents in Microsoft 2004 for the Mac

Now here's a topic that any Mac OS X power user can sink fangs into — the idea that a document on a multi‐user system can be everyone's property, allowing anyone in your family, workgroup, or highly competitive mob to make whatever changes are necessary, whenever they like.

Of course, potential pitfalls lurk — even in the Apple world, there's no such thing as an operating system that's both powerful and perfectly simple. However, I think you'll find that our dear friends from Cupertino have done just about as well as can be expected and that the settings that you use to share documents are fairly easy to understand and use.

Prepare to share!

Sharing over a Network versus Sharing on a Single Mac

First, allow me to clear up what I've found to be a common misconception by using another of Mark's Maxims.

Sharing documents on a single computer is fundamentally different from the file sharing that you've used on a network.

True, multiple users can share a document over a network, which is a topic that I cover in Book V. But although the results are the same, the way that you share that same document on a single machine betwixt multiple users is a completely different turn of the screw. In this section, I discuss the factoids behind the matter.

No network is required

Although reiterating that no network is ...