Hal over at the Common Culinarian blog (warning, don't click through unless you're OK with seeing gorgeous pictures of yummy delights) had a great post talking about the rewards and challenges of moving over to a Mac.

Specifically, Hal is an accountant, and he has more than four years of financial info stored from his Quicken (for Windows) 2006.  When he went to convert it over to the Mac version of Quicken, he ran into a couple of issues.

First, he likes the richer feature set of Quicken for Windows.  Like the ability for Quicken to talk to more banks over the internet.

Second, when he went to convert over the financial information, apparently he had some serious challenges with the conversion process. 

Rather than cleaning it by hand, he realized that there was a simpler solution using VMware Fusion to run Windows on Mac with Quicken for Windows on top of that. 

Here's a screenshot that he posted up on his blog of Quicken for Windows running in Unity view on VMware Fusion (is anyone surprised at his desktop background?):

The other thing Hal's using VMware Fusion for is to run Google's Picasa on  Mac. He's a bigger fan of Picasa than iPhoto, and as such, he finds running it in a Windows XP virtual machine, just like his Quicken, running on top of VMware Fusion, suits him just fine.

So for the rest of you who are a little leery of Quicken for Mac, or big fans of Picasa, fear not.  Hal, the Common Culinarian, has shown us the delicious light.