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I'm considering upgrading to Office 2010 but can't justify the cost of the Business licence, so will probably end up without MS Outlook. We've been pretty heavy users of Outlook for years so I don't want to jump until I know the best way to fulfil our needs. So here is what we need:
- Email with multiple accounts and multiple addresses within accounts
- Calendar with offline viewing
- Calendar and contacts sync with iPhone(s), preferably direct from the machine not via an intermediate account
I think Mozilla Thunderbird could give us what we need for the email but am less sure about the calendar.
So what can you recommend?
Cheers
Ian
Ian for the Office, have you looked at Open Office it's free and fully MS compatible. As for outlook I'm not sure. TBH it takes some beating, it's far better than it was 5 years ago, I would be tempted to upgrade Outlook but look at Open office for the rest. ( it has Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Access alternatives).
Interesting idea Nick. How compatible is it and how similar to MS Office in use?
I have it on the laptop and have t seen any compatibility issues (well, in PowerPoint I've seen a couple of font miss matches but nothing serious, probably just need to download the relative fonts - tends to match to nearest one).
You will have to change default file formatt ( no big deal) as it defaults to open offices proprietary extensions.
Open office is now used by a lot of major organisations. If nothing else it's worth downloading and giving it a trial.
open office is what we all use too. It's brilliant...seems to do everything Microsoft does. Just remember to save to Microsoft file types if sharing as it has its own file names that can fool Microsoft. And then Thunderbird will look after email well.
Thanks folks. If I am using Open Office I will probably stump up the cash to upgrade Outlook.
There does seem to be an offline version of Google Calendar but information is a bit sketchy, I think it may be in beta at the moment. I must admit I like how easy it is to sync Outlook with my iPhone and I would want any replacement to be as easy.
It would probably be better for you to look at Libre Office....
Open Office is now effectivly dead - when Oracle took over Sun they caused so many problems amongst the developer community that the great majority of them left the project and just forked the product to Libre Office. (That's the thing with this sort of software, you can walk away and start your own version using the same source code).
Moving forwards it's likely that only Libre Office will be being updated properly.
Jon
If you have children in full time education you can get office 2010 for under 40 squids
software4students
I've used Thunderbird for mail for a few years at home and work with no issues. Some of us at the office need to juggle many different email accounts (about a dozen for me) and it handles all that well with a good search facility and ability to set up automated rules if you need that.
I've just moved over to Libre Office from Open Office a few weeks back too - all seems to be working well so far.
Following previous threads like this on here I installed Open Office on a couple of PCs at home.
Got to say, I was completely underwhelmed with it and after 6 months just uninstalled it and got MS Office instead.
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