Open Office and Thunderbird Not Ready for Consumer Use
Posted on July 26th, 2006by Michael Gray in Ideas, Tools
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About 4 months ago I started an experiment to see if I could go 6 months without using Microsoft Office Word, Excel and Outlook. I tried using Thunderbird and the Open Office Suite instead. This past weekend about months in I called it off and returned to Microsoft Office.
I’ve got nothing against Microsoft but if I can save $400 every time I buy a new computer that would be a good thing. I first made the switch from Word and Excel to Open Office. Open office handled all of my old word documents pretty well, there were some very minor formatting changes but nothing too hard to work around. The one change I noticed right away was that the spelling and grammar check wasn’t quite as good. Every spelling program has to learn your specialty words so that was to be expected however Open Office did a really bad job at correcting my grammar. Plain and simple it was a noticeably inferior to Microsoft Word. This weekend I had to do a mail merge. Nothing to complicated just taking 150 addresses and printing labels, and letters. Getting the formatting to work in Open Office was nothing short of torture.
Converting from Excel to Open Office again was pretty painless, there were a few math calculations that took some adjusting, but all in all pretty easy. I imagine most SEO’s have some sort of monthly spreadsheet they work with. I take these monthly sheets and roll them into a yearly sheet. Open office had an incredibly difficult time working with multiple sheets. It was slow, torturously slow, like go get a cup of coffee, bagel, and read the first 10 pages of the newspaper slow. After 4 months of trying open office just didn’t cut the mustard.
I love firefox, with the right plugins it’s an extremely powerful tool for anyone who spends as much time online as I do. I had hoped Thunderbird would live up to those standards, however it fell short. One of the most annoying things was how it handles addresses. You have to create different address books for things like business and and personal contacts, instead of one big address book with different categories, it made things awkward. Additionally Thunderbird doesn’t play nicely with anything else. You can hobble together a way to get it interface with your IPod, but doesn’t work with LinkedIn, my Motorola Razr Phone or any other address book import export program. The Thunderbird/Sunbird calendar program interface is probably the absolute worst calendar program I have ever seen in my entire life. The straw that finally killed Thunderbird was it’s ability to backup and restore data. The power cable for my main laptop is on the fritz, so while I was waiting for the replacement part from EBay I tried to move my data to an older backup laptop. A process that would have taken 5 minutes in Outlook took over 90 minutes with Thunderbird and never really got done.
Truth be told I probably fit into the category of power user, so advanced functions like mail merge, grammar check and chaining together multiple workbooks killed Open Office. For Thunderbird it was the little things like the ability to work with and transport the data in and out of the program were the straw that broke the camels back. So are any of you using those programs are you experiencing limitations, and if so how are you dealing with them?
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July 26th, 2006 at 7:07 am
Open office was torture for me too. I think you have to be either dirt poor with no access to a torrent / warz site or have venomous hatred for Microsoft to suffer through using that suite of products.
Thunderbird I installed a few weeks back because I was offline for a bit and wanted to have RSS feeds downloaded to my computer. Then I got scobleizer’s rss read list (it’s like 1000+ feeds) and downloaded it to make sure I had more than enough to read. My GOD, he is subscribed to some freaking boring crap / drivel.
On an unrelated note about your link blog . . . I’ve actually been subscribed to your delicious feed for like 8 months now; It’s mostly good stuff.
July 26th, 2006 at 8:31 am
I’ve been making a stab at using Open Office Write after having given up on it a year ago. I think I will again. Word has a much larger vocabularly and catches things like capitalizing “Spanish” that write misses. And I do benefit from Word’s grammar suggestions (though it can be a bit schoolmarmish).
Unless I’ve missed it I don’t see a way to just set junk handling to a default for all accounts in Thunderbird. Much more annoying is the extra steps required to recover disk space. I was shocked to discover how much I’d lost to “deleted” messages.
I use Outlook at work with third-party spam and anti-virus tools and have no complaints.
July 26th, 2006 at 9:24 am
I agree that open office has a long way to go. I run Linux (exclusively), but I missed Excel’s formulas, functions, and other features enough to use codeweavers’ crossover office with excel instead of open-office spreadsheet.
I think that will change in the next version however and I am always willing to try to go MS free in the future.
I think Thunderbird is a great email client however. I used to use Evolution but Thunderbird is by far superior on Linux in my opinion. I have never experienced the performance issues you are referring to (but I don’t have Windows under the hood).
July 26th, 2006 at 12:00 pm
Dude, you have your email trapped on one computer? Set it free, man. Try Gmail, or I’m sure you could get a Yahoo! beta account for their new mail system.
July 26th, 2006 at 1:38 pm
While I am no evangelist for M$FT, I must say that their Office suite of products is far and away the best on the market. Even after switching to a Mac platform, I still use Word, Excel, and Entourage.
July 26th, 2006 at 1:46 pm
Yeah, Thunderbird is in the crapper as far as looking at contacts. I can’t believe how many stupid contacts it automatically created for me.. just a total mess.
July 26th, 2006 at 2:21 pm
4 months… well done. My dabbling with OpenOffice never got passed a few days at a time.
It was the spreadsheet package that killed it for me. I can use Excel extensively at times.
The Open version just didn’t stand up, which is a shame.
One day I’d like to give Linux a good run out as a Windows alternative. A robust OpenOffice would make that a much easier call to make.
July 26th, 2006 at 6:05 pm
“Dude, you have your email trapped on one computer? Set it free, man. Try Gmail, or I’m sure you could get a Yahoo! beta account for their new mail system.” -Matt Cutts
Yep, gmail and if you want to use your domain name addresses for admin type stuff forward to gmail > to gmail > to gmail - well you get the picture.
Use gmail (or yahoo) and never lose you email again.
Get
with
the
program
michael..
(hmm, what’s he trying to rank for here?)
July 26th, 2006 at 6:29 pm
Well, I moved to TB from Outlook purely from performance. Any time I use Outlook I just can hear (literally) my computer resources draining. Hard disk just hunts all the time.
July 26th, 2006 at 7:33 pm
I use OpenOffice as I haven’t paid for an MSOffice licence on my most recent powerbook, and I do try to avoid using pirate software.
I havent had any major issues with it, it does the job, the main thing I miss is a function to paste values - OOP simply doesnt have that and I used to use it *a lot*
I am using Thunderbird for mail as OSX Mail is absolutely *awful* - I don’t know why anyone would use it. I was using Gyazmail (this is OSX remember) for a long time and was happy with it until I had machine issues, and that was one of the things I changed as part of the diagnosis. I’ve moved to IMAP now (I have my own servers - why on earth would I give gmail my custom?) which gyazmail doesn’t yet support, so I can’t go back atm.
Thunderbird is doing the job, without any major issues. I didn’t like it much at first, but I’ve gotten used to it and can’t remember what my problems were at first (its only been a few months)
I havent used Outlook since I left the corporate world, and I hated it when I did use it. It would be my last choice. Last time I was using Windows on a daily basis I was using The Bat - very nice
So - what are you trying to rank for, Michael?
July 26th, 2006 at 8:51 pm
Not trying to rank for anything with this one.
As far as using Gmail well if Google wouldn’t add headers that make the most utilized email client software say “on behalf of” I might use it. Additionally I’m not entirely comfortable with y’all having access to all of my emails, ya know google borg connect the dots and all that tin-foil hat conspiracy jazz …
However I do reccomend it to other people quite frequently
July 27th, 2006 at 1:50 am
I use gmail and would LOVE that header crap removed.
July 27th, 2006 at 2:05 am
i’m surprised to hear that you’re so happy with outlook. i only use it at because i have to; we don’t even use exchange server, i just am tired of getting stuck with winmail.dat attachments and other microsoft-based nonsense so i slog it out with the all-time worst imap client of them all: outlook. i mean, i know they really want people to use exchange, no imap. but can’t i get it to save sent mail in a folder without setting up stupid rules? ugh. and really, outlook’s internal search and contact management is rotten - seriously, it really doesn’t function for the most part. the mail search in outlook fucntionality was the main reason i started using google desktop.
on a related note, though, i don’t think any email client compares to apple mail. i use thunderbird for personal mail on my pc at work and its junk filter is rotten. apple mail has a fantastic junk filter, though, and its consolidated inbox is wonderful. only thing i don’t like is that sometimes it drops a ton of question marks in its rich text email (though maybe this is just another issue with outlook not playing well with others.. probably).
July 27th, 2006 at 4:14 am
Hey, for last how many years you were using Microsoft? I guess more than 6 months. And you come to conclusion that “Open Office and Thunderbird Not Ready for Consumer Use”, not fair man.
You should have given at least 1 year. It is general human tendency that we don’t like to change until we are force to change.
Never mind after all Time is the money.
July 27th, 2006 at 10:37 am
So resistance IS futile !
That’s news to me about the new Yahoo mail beta. I’ll have to sign up. Hopefully they let you delete entire folders now.
July 27th, 2006 at 12:43 pm
I started the same personal experiments.
Level of use is key. I write a lot and use MS-Word, Excel and PowerPoint daily for work.
I’ve been using OpenOffice on the PC for a month now. I’m not convinced yet that it is a bad experience.
Overall, no one I work with has complained about the files I sent them which I created or edited with OpenOffice.
The presentation app “Impress” does seem to render tables a bit oddly when I’m editing files originally created in MS-PowerPoint.
The word processor “Writer” does a fine job. No complaints here. I use tables and formating extensively, but never use features like mail merge.
The spreadsheet program “Calc” does a fine job for me too in terms of simple formulas and graphs. I haven’t had need for extremely advanced functions.
I’ve been very happy using Thunderbird on the Mac for personal use. I’m much more satisfied with Thunderbird than Apple Mail or MS-Entourage. I wish Thunderbird was better at managing junk mail. I spend a lot of time trying to block spam at the server level instead because the client app doesn’t do a great job.
For work, I have to use Outlook — there’s just no adequate replacement for that and sharing a calendar among co-workers.
I’ve used Firefox for the past year on both my PC and Mac. Love it!
July 27th, 2006 at 2:22 pm
wait till you see whats in store in MS office 2007, it will blow you away.
July 27th, 2006 at 3:18 pm
sweet Khurram, we should see that in the marketplace around 2009
July 31st, 2006 at 1:44 am
hey, for the price of one computer ($400-$500), i could live with all the shortcomings.
And, use Abiword instead of the Open Office version.
The future of office application will all be web-based.
August 16th, 2006 at 10:12 am
I’m a great fan of open source software, but not to the point of losing essential functionality. For the vast majority of computer users, who send ordinary emails and use office software for letters and their kids’ homework, Thunderbird and OpenOffice are fine.
Unfortunately if you are writing a piece of word-limited work such as a university essay (and need an accurate word count), or have a PDA (and need to synchronise calendar data with it), both functions which are commonly required by business users. Thunderbird and OpenOffice WILL get there, it will just take another year or two.
September 2nd, 2006 at 7:31 pm
Lea, Open Office does have a function to “paste values” or “paste as values”… here’s how you use it:
1. Copy the range.
2. Select the cell where you are pasting to.
3. Right-click and choose Paste.. Special
4. If “Paste All” is ticked, untick it. Many other options now become available.
5. Under “Selection”, untick everything but “Numbers”. Click Ok.
6. This might seem like a bit of a hassle, but it retains your settings for the next paste, so you don’t have to keep ticking and unticking boxes.
October 3rd, 2006 at 4:04 pm
Yes, Thunderbird and Open Office are way behind Microsoft now. But we also have to understand the enormous funds that are avaialble to Microsoft teams. A healthy competition from such products improves the overall quality of tools anyway.
April 11th, 2007 at 6:02 am
Thunderbird works, it has some slight flaws connected with huge size mailboxes, but Outlook would not work with those at all…
Open Office does all I want and is faster in operation.
Two excellent pieces of software I can only recommend…I was a Microsoft user for more than 10 years.
I am sorry that I still have to run Windows programs, otherwise I would entirely change, Linux is almost user-friendly now, and Thunderbird/Open Office work thetre as well. The worst thing in XP is that “Explorer”. It is buggy and slow, in spite it has improved since the dreadful 2000 version. If you didn’t notice, from time to time it even tries to rebuild your desktop, when you are not even touching it…
November 15th, 2007 at 4:06 am
The point about open source is that it necessarily revolves around a community of developers, testers and users. If you have a problem with an open source software, visit the website; participate in the user forums; ask and learn; eventually teach other newbies, even if you are not a developer who can code bug-fixes. You will soon notice how MSFT and other commercial software companies short-change their customers with buggy software that can only be fixed with more $$ for a new version.
For the record, I use Firefox and Thunderbird exclusively at work; OOo partly alongside MSO at work; OOo exclusively at home; I started with OOo build 641 and yes, there were and are problems and solutions follow soon enough for me, which is more that what I can say for Office 2003.