 wifi4milezBig Russ, 1918 to 2008. Rest in Peace
join:2004-08-07
New York, NY | Good open source Visio and Outlook alternatives? Can anyone recommend a good (free!) alternative to both Outlook and Visio? |
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 pnjunctionTeksavvy ExtremePremium
join:2008-01-24
Toronto, ON
kudos:1 | Thunderbird as an alternative to Outlook is OK depending on how attached you are to Outlook's interface and what kind of exchange services you use. For just accessing e-mail it is fine, I bailed on it at work because the fancy exchange features we have now didn't work with it.
Open Office draw is a free alternative to Visio, but I'm not sure I'd call it good. I made a go of using OO for everything (writer, impress, draw, calc) for a while but in the end bailed on it when I got a new laptop with MS office. The bugs and inconsistency of it just drove me up the wall.
Some of the issues I encountered didn't leave me a good impression of open source development. You'd think they'd be right on top of things, but it seems like it's easy for things that are obscure or difficult to slip through the cracks. One example is I wondered why I can't flip through slides with the mouse wheel in Impress like you can with Powerpoint. Powerpoint is smart and scrolls within the slide if it is zoomed in but flips the slides if the entire slide is fitting on the screen. Searching about this feature in Impress gives some forum posts from years ago with people asking for this and devs saying this would be too hard and change the entire scrolling system or whatever. Well that's that. |
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wifi4milezBig Russ, 1918 to 2008. Rest in Peace
join:2004-08-07
New York, NY | Good info, thanks. The Outlook replacement is just for personal (home) use, so Exchange support is not important. I have a bunch of POP and IMAP accounts that I would like to use. Would you recommend it for that? Also, have you ever heard of/tried a Visio "like" program called DIA?
»live.gnome.org/Dia
I would only use it for adding network diagrams to sites like this, so my needs are very basic. Your perspective on the OO project is interesting as I did consider testing them out. At work I use the full MS suite of products, and I used to have Office on my home laptop. Unfortunately the laptop died and I bought a new one, and I just cant justify (yet) spending as much on ONE software package as I spent on the machine....
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"No you won't" -The American people to President Obama (11/2/2010)
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pnjunctionTeksavvy ExtremePremium
join:2008-01-24
Toronto, ON
kudos:1 | Yes for accessing POP and IMAP e-mail Thunderbird works well.
Never heard of DIA. It looks OK in the screen shots but I'd have to check out the 'experience' for myself. I'd probably try that before trying OO. I had heard OO was dead now, but apparently it was 'donated' to Apache by Oracle and development has slowed during the transition but they are planning new releases in 2012. |
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 nightshade74Yet another genxerPremium
join:2004-11-06
Prattville, AL
 ·Charter
 ·voip.ms
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said by wifi4milez:Can anyone recommend a good (free!) alternative to both Outlook and Visio?
+1 For personal Email thunderbird is a good choice.
Check out alternativto.net --
»alternativeto.net/software/microsoft-visio/ |
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wifi4milezBig Russ, 1918 to 2008. Rest in Peace
join:2004-08-07
New York, NY | reply to wifi4milez
Does Thunderbird have something like .pst files in case my laptop dies and I need to restore it, or does it back everything up online? |
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nightshade74Yet another genxerPremium
join:2004-11-06
Prattville, AL Reviews:
·Charter
·voip.ms
| said by wifi4milez:Does Thunderbird have something like .pst files in case my laptop dies and I need to restore it, or does it back everything up online?
The easy thing is to just copy your profile folder:
»www.redbridgenet.com/how-to/how-···ndows-7/ |
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 madylarianThe curmudgeonlyPremium
join:2002-01-03
Parkville, MD | reply to wifi4milez
I'd suggest looking at Pegasus. I've been using it for about 15 years now so I've had to reinstall it on a number of new computers and hard drives and it's quite easy. From my backups I just copy all of the files in the Pmail directory then reinstall from the downloaded .exe file. It restores all of my settings, folder hierarchy, accounts and identities and saved emails.
mady
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Honi soit qui mal y pense |
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I used Outlook Express for many years for e-mail at home then moved over to Thunderbird when OE started to be too much of a problem - mostly because it was apparently abandoned by Microsoft years ago. It's good enough and similar to Outlook Express in many ways. My only complaint is that it is a bit slow and its interface is a bit quirky at best. The speed issue has improved in the latest version though. |
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OZOPremium
join:2003-01-17
kudos:2 | reply to wifi4milez
said by wifi4milez:Does Thunderbird have something like .pst files in case my laptop dies and I need to restore it, or does it back everything up online?
No, it doesn't use .PST. It uses standard mbox format, which is much better then PST. PST is a proprietary database, which could be broken and you have to apply tools to restore its content (if it's possible at all). mbox, on the other hand, is just a plain text file, which contains all your mails. You can even read it with your text editor and fix any problem (never heard of such, but it's easy to do anyway). Mail box files can be copied to any place and they still work as usual. Just point to that file in your mail client after you move it and you'll see content immediately.
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Keep it simple, it'll become complex by itself... |
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wifi4milezBig Russ, 1918 to 2008. Rest in Peace
join:2004-08-07
New York, NY | reply to madylarian
said by madylarian:I'd suggest looking at Pegasus. I've been using it for about 15 years now so I've had to reinstall it on a number of new computers and hard drives and it's quite easy. From my backups I just copy all of the files in the Pmail directory then reinstall from the downloaded .exe file. It restores all of my settings, folder hierarchy, accounts and identities and saved emails.
mady
Do you have any screenshots? His website doesnt show any pics of it. It sounds interesting however so I am interested in learning more.
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"No you won't" -The American people to President Obama (11/2/2010)
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If you're using IMAP, it doesn't typically matter--it's all on the server [by default, though you can configure things to delete stuff from the server--I don't]. I don't really think there's anything better than Thunderbird for POP/IMAP (though Postbox adds some possibly useful features). You can get both Thunderbird and Dia in portable format from PortableApps.com (which is what I use exclusively). There are several essential add-ons for Thunderbird at AMO, so that's also a plus (not to be confused with Google+ POS).
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"Sorry for not responding to your post, but either I haven't seen it yet, or what you said was so devoid of substance that I found it utterly uninteresting." |
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madylarianThe curmudgeonlyPremium
join:2002-01-03
Parkville, MD | reply to wifi4milez
I'm not sure what you want to see but this shows an inbox and folders list:
It's easy to filter new, incoming mail to a folder. I should say that I only read/open email in plain text but one of the things that I like best about Pegasus is that it's easy to block any scripts and connections to the web since it has it's own HTML generator. Of course, this means I might miss a lot of bells and whistles, but I didn't want them in the first place.
The at the top of the screen is the current identity. It's also rather easy to set up multiple sending options. I have two different SMTP servers set up and can switch between them with a few mouse clicks.
mady
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Honi soit qui mal y pense |
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Since you're coming from an Outlook place, have you thought about wanting calendaring/scheduling down the road? Thunderbird also supports that either strictly local, local + online (sync), or strictly online. As far as the look & feel go, you can change that as much and as often as you like--maybe even make it look like a version of Outlook.
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"Sorry for not responding to your post, but either I haven't seen it yet, or what you said was so devoid of substance that I found it utterly uninteresting." |
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bdnhsv
join:2012-01-20
Huntsville, AL | reply to wifi4milez
Dia works pretty well - not quite as easy and intuitive as Visio, but not bad considering the price. It has a good amount of stencils, and can do object grouping, etc. I use it for personal use and have made some pretty involved diagrams. |
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 WutanGPremium
join:2001-12-12
Seaford, DE | reply to wifi4milez
By all means don't forget to try OpenOffice for a Visio alternative and any other office needs. Thunderbird works well with OpenOffice also for misc. needs.
Crap just realized it was already recommended, +1 for OpenOffice. |
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 newviewEx .. Ex .. ExactlyPremium
join:2001-10-01
Parsonsburg, MD
kudos:1
·Vonage
 ·DIRECTV
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I highly recommend you take a look at LibreOffice ...
quote:
OpenOffice.org is one of the leading competitors to the Microsoft Office suite of business productivity applications. Originally developed as StarOffice in the late 1990s, the suite had been managed in recent years by Sun Microsystems as an open source project. But when Oracle acquired Sun in April 2009, the future of Sun's software offerings -- particularly free ones like OpenOffice.org -- was called into question. Before long, key OpenOffice.org developers, unhappy with the status quo under Oracle, began defecting from the project.
The result was LibreOffice, a new fork of the OpenOffice.org code base that's maintained by a nonprofit organization called the Document Foundation.
»www.infoworld.com/d/applications···fice-716
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wifi4milezBig Russ, 1918 to 2008. Rest in Peace
join:2004-08-07
New York, NY | said by newview:I highly recommend you take a look at LibreOffice ...
quote:
OpenOffice.org is one of the leading competitors to the Microsoft Office suite of business productivity applications. Originally developed as StarOffice in the late 1990s, the suite had been managed in recent years by Sun Microsystems as an open source project. But when Oracle acquired Sun in April 2009, the future of Sun's software offerings -- particularly free ones like OpenOffice.org -- was called into question. Before long, key OpenOffice.org developers, unhappy with the status quo under Oracle, began defecting from the project.
The result was LibreOffice, a new fork of the OpenOffice.org code base that's maintained by a nonprofit organization called the Document Foundation.
»www.infoworld.com/d/applications···fice-716
I will check that out!
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"No you won't" -The American people to President Obama (11/2/2010)
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 runnoftPremium
join:2003-10-14
Deerfield, IL
kudos:1
·Comcast
1 edit | reply to printscreen
said by printscreen:I used Outlook Express for many years for e-mail at home then moved over to Thunderbird when OE started to be too much of a problem - mostly because it was apparently abandoned by Microsoft years ago.
Microsoft's free e-mail client, which used to be called Outlook Express, has been called Windows Live Mail since 2006. It's downloaded as part of the free Windows Live Essentials package. It is said to work about the same as OE did.
My main beef with Thunderbird, and I bailed on it about seven years ago because of this, was always clunky and at times broken backup and restore of saved e-mail messages that couldn't be counted on and burned me more than once with lost e-mails. They may have fixed Thunderbird by now, but I would certainly test a backup AND restore of saved e-mail before needing to count on it in either an emergency restore or a move to a different hard drive. I use Outlook in Microsoft Office now which of course is not free, but that means I don't really know how well any of the free clients currently work. I also have a system ghosting backup with ShadowProtect, but I didn't back then when I lost saved e-mail. |
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WutanGPremium
join:2001-12-12
Seaford, DE | I use MozBackup for backing up emails in Thunderbird, it's a very simple tool. It can also make a backup profile for Firefox too, bookmarks, addons ,etc. It works well, I've used it for about 2 years now. Just wanted to throw that out there.
»mozbackup.jasnapaka.com/
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Let me tell you what Melba Toast is packin' right here, all right. We got 4:11 Positrac outback, 750 double pumper, Edelbrock intake, bored over 30, 11 to 1 pop-up pistons, turbo-jet 390 horsepower. We're talkin' some funkin' muscle.
-Wooderson |
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