Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Using Parallels 3 SmartSelect


One of the cool features of Parallels 3 is the SmartSelect feature that allows you to use Windows applications to open files in OSX and OSX applications to open files in your Windows virtual machine.  Although I read the documentation, it took me a while to figure out how to get the feature working, so here's my quick instruction manual on how to set a Windows app to open files in OSX (I specifically needed this for Visio files):



  1. Make sure that Parallels is running. (I know that seems obvious, but none of this works if Parallels is not running)

  2. Open the application -- Visio in my case -- in the Parallels Virtual machine.

  3. You will see that the application now has an icon in the OSX dock.

  4. Ctrl-click (or for MacBook users that have it enabled, hold down to fingers on the mouse and click) the application icon in the dock.smarselect dock

  5. The contextual menu will pop up and click "Smart Select".

  6. In my case I have OmniGraffle on my OSX machine, which is an analog to Visio on the OSX side, so I had to actually change the settings to have all Visio documents opened with Visio rather than OmniGraffle.osx smarselect

  7. Once you've saved your changes, if you run Parallels in Coherence mode and double-click a file that you've designated be opened by a Windows application, the application will automagically open as if it were simply a native OSX application.



If you click the pictures on the side, they will link through to larger images.



Link -- Parallels 3 


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