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Not sure if this is a PC or a MAC question - I suspect the former more appropriate!

Last weekend I was doing the results for our Clubs local rally - which involves a complicated series of linked spreadsheets.

The idea is that the main results system sits on one PC (Has to be a PC because Excel 2008 for MAC doesn't support VB) and I have a separate spreadsheet fo each stage that is shared and can be opened on more than one PC - for speedier entry.

Anyway, I was using my works laptop and the main one onto a router and the MAC as the slave.

Could I get them to talk ? No chance. My IT man at wok said it should be ok - but nothing. Both could see the router but not each other.

I suspect its becuase my works lappy is on a domian - but any ideas?

What OS were in use on the Windows computers?

Oh, sorry, Windows is XP MAC was Leopard.

One throught my IT man had was to change the workgroup on the MAC to the same name as the domain on the works Lappy.

Not had chance to try it yet - and its one of those things that I probably won't need to do for another 12months!

yeah they can be funny things about work groups can Windows systems.
Then trying to connect it to a Mac as well - you're just asking for trouble  ::)

This seems to be one of those areas that MS can not dispute - Apples simplistic and reliable networking abilities.

Wouldn't it just be easier to get a cross over cable?

Why would that make it any better? Serious question! The router is just giving out an IP address so is effectively transparent to the computers isn't it?

With a router you're dealing with various forms of security and firewall.
You have to create a work group and then both computers to sign up to it and agree to accept membership of said group by other computers etc.
Then you have to allocate permissions to various drives and folders.
Don't forget you have to sync protection type as well - MAC handles WEP and WSP differently to Windows - it is generally more robust in its security.
Windows does not handle this in the friendliest of manners. Getting it to hook up to MAC OS for networking took up a couple of whole chapters during my MCP Studies.

So now to a cross over cable.
Plug it into both computers.
Allow them to recognise each other and assign permissions to share the hard drives with each other.
Um - i think that's about it.

Might involve an extra tweak i've forgotten - but generally i always found it to work more successfully.
A bit like booting up from  a DOS boot disk - maybe rather bog standard and requires the use of DOS commands, but it always works!