Free Software 'Magazine'

Discovered the Free Software Magazine today.

Already into it's 8th issue and Issue 7 has some connection with my project here.

Countdown continues to next week's FiL installation

Arghhhh - Labels and Mail Merge

OK, so today I got my first issue with Open Office and Thunderbird...

In previous years, we have used our Outlook Contacts as source data for creating Envelope Labels, we have a category defined "Christmas Cards" which means we can simply merge our e-mail contact postal addresses out to a label format in word, print them and slap them on the envelopes.

Issue 1: Thunderbird doesn't support Categories - Arghhhh
Work Around 1: Export everything to a calc source sheet, edit out the unwanted addressess and then merge them into writer

Issue 2: Did they forget some functionality in the Open Office Mail Merge wizard? It only seems possible to use the wizard to merge to a letter format - Arghhh
Work Around 2: Discovered that you can add data fields inside the label dialog (you can also use Thunderbird Address Book directly as a data source). Managed to create the necessary labels for printing, saved these as a document at the moment.

Summary
The label functionality of OpenOffice is certainly not as slick as MS Office. It seemed very difficult to save the labels out to a single document. The end result was 10 separate single page documents that each need to be edited as there are blank fields to be removed, they then need to be printed separately (With Word, you can create your merged document, edit it and then send to print in one fluid step).

Well, we only really make these labels once a year so it's no big issue for us. Getting it all worked out took about 3 hours (which is about what it took me to figure out Word's Mail merge the first time).

Going Live with Open Office

Fifteen minutes of installation and we're live with Open Office today!

We still have MS Office installed, but the office PC is now setup to open all MS Office documents with the respective Open Office components.

A short overview with my wife and everythings go. That was all quite painless!.

Now we are really at the beginning of this whole experiment. The next two weeks will be spent qetting familiar with the new software so that we're ready for the remote support once we set up my Father in Law's (FiL) new PC.

Going Live with Thunderbird

Installed Thunderbird on our office PC this weekend...a little bit of tinkering and we're live!

Managed to import the old Outlook PST without too many issues. We seem to have all our messages and contacts.

Also setup private mail accounts for both my wife and I and also our shared mail account that downloads messages into a shared local folder.

The only comments so far are:

Thunderbird isn't quite as slick as Outlook, when it sends mail, it interupts what you're doing until the message has been sent (Outlook sent in the background which was much nicer).

But hey, it works and it's free!