Some friends are going to try my wife's Mac G3 Ver 2
with upgrades we replaced this Christmas with an iMac G5
(and we LOVE it!) cuz they're having so many contamination
problems over the internet even with some really good
protection - Earthlink dial up - and they are continually
bombarded with nasty ware.

They have some stuff on their XP machine they'd like to
transfer to the Mac (OSX latest version) which has Windows,
Excel etc etc.

Lots of it is simply pictures, much of it already on CDs
recorded with XP.

Any chance they'll read on the G3 / OSX?

If not directly, what's a good way to do that?
I could take their CDs and send them onto one of the
picture upload websites, then download them into our
G5 and re-record them if nothing else.

Thanks for any tips!

They will read if transferred over properly. Office files will need some find tuning.

Is there a chance you could network these together? That is the simpliest way for transferring large amounts (multiple gigs) of files.

As long as you have Office for OS X you won't have any problems with files. Ever since Office 98 for the Mac all the file formats have been the same between Windows and Mac. If you don't have Office for Mac you'll have to get NeoOffice, which is a port of Open Office for OS X, its a pretty decent office suite and its free. If the Excel docs don't have macros in them there should be no problems opening them.

If you can't network them, and you aren't dealing with multiple gigs of data, burning to cd may be the best solution for you. Or a USB flash drive would work even better.

Google for OpenOffice; It's the free download that contains both Word and
Excel Functionality. Drag any MS file onto the Icon or Alias for OpenOffice and
it will translate the document into a very reasonable presentable presentation.
Perform a Save AS ... and you the use <dbl-click> to open the document directly.

My wif'es eMac networks with my XP/Home nicely and we trade docs regularly