Thunderbird/Outlook/OE

[-pops-]

My son has posted this on the other site but only had a few responses so wonders if anyone here has a view.

He's thinking of ditching MS Office and moving over to Either OpenOffice or StarOffice in his next round of machine upgrades. This will mean the loss of Outlook unless he buys it as a standalone.

He only uses the email facility on Outlook and is curious about how it (and OE) compares with Mozilla Thunderbird.

If anyone has any experience of Thunderbird, can you let us know what it is; good, bad or indifferent.

[Boris]

I've used Thunderbird for 18 months.

No problems whatsoever :)

You can use the open source utility MozBackup to back up everything in it.

+ Sunbird to replace the Outlook calendar.

[rong]

I've also used it for over 12 months and have had no problems.

[catgate]

I agree with Boris and rong about Thunderbird.

However I do think that going over to Open Office may not be totally acceptable to someone who is accustomed to the speed with which M$ Office launches itself. Open office is very good, and has some things that knock the spots off M$ Office, e.g it does a very good job with DTP (I am just finding out). It is a little less intuitive than M$ Office so switching over to full usage is not as instantaneous as I had hoped, but then I'm rapidly "getting past it". But, given patience I feel it is probably going to be the better of the two when (if) I master all its foibles. (If only it would fire up a bit quicker.)

[-pops-]

Thanks for that - I'll pass it on.

Regarding OpenOffice, I think it is a certainty that he will changeover completely sooner or later. He's already using it (or StarOffice) on some machines in line with several overseas governments and some of his clients. His conversion to an MS Office alternative is being accelerated by MS itself in its new (2007) version of Word which uses a version of XML (or other open format). Even so, the open source offices suites will convert to the MS format with little problem so there is little need to spend £££ on buying multiple copies of the new version of Office.

[catgate]

There was one other point I forgot to mention (it just slipped away as I was reading through my message). That point is Spreadsheets in OO. I find them very slow compared to M$. It may be that there is something that I have not set up properly, but compared to Excel they are veritably pedestrian....but even then OO is excellent value for money to a Yorkshireman!!

[Scarecrow Man]

I love thunderbird. I've used it for a few years now, and would never go back to Outlook.

If you find you dont have a feature that Outlook had, there is probably an add-on for it.

[trackrat]

I do not find the Spreadsheets in OO that slow, although I have not used Microsoft office for a few years now.

And I do agree with Catgate about the OO being pedestrian in firing up.

[ɹəuəllıʍ ʇɐb]

I use both Outlook (2003) and Thunderbird (2.0 beta); OL for my business mail, and TB for my private mail.

I like both for its own reasons; OL for its excellent additional features, TB for the great mail tool and newsreader. If it were not for the fact that I need Outlook to connect to the company Exchange Server, and use its advanced features, I would probably ditch Outlook.

So for someone using only mail (without Exchange), there is absolutely no need for Outlook.

Outlook Express is not an option. I tried it once for a few minutes - it's useless!