NEW Macbook air and external HDD with windows files

Hi,
I just bought (2 days ago) my first MAC (finally). After so many years of working with windows it was time to get of the dark side . Anyway, this is not my first time around apple products (I had iphones and ipads) so I know some basic stuff like iCloud, keychain etc. I bought 13inc macbook air, 128 GB SSD.
Now this is my problem:
Although I worked on a windows computer I was saving all my files (work related, movies, music, tvshows, photos- a lot of them) on my external HDD (500 GB). Now, when I transfered to Mac I would like to have my Word, PPT and music files on my mac but not the photos, those I would like to keap on my EHDD. Can this actually work without some work around file extensions and EHDD formating? Can I use my EHDD like this? I know that it is both for Windows and MAC (it was written on the box).

I depends in what format the external drive is formatted as to how easy this is going to be.
I bet there is a good chance it is NTFS. If so, some moderately bad news. The Mac OS can read it, but not write to it natively, unless it is a networked drive.
Sure, you can add third party functionality to the Mac, so it will write to the external drive, but I would avoid it if possible. If your drive is already formatted FAT 32, or ExFAT, then you can perform cross platform reading and writing, without issue.
Fortunately we live in a time where most external drives are now relatively inexpensive. If you don't want to, or can't reformat that drive, because you have no space to put the files in the interim (I hope they are not just in place, anyway), consider buying a new external drive for sharing purposes.
Just my 2 cents.

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NEW Macbook air and external HDD with windows files

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