The Thunderbird Trials

Well, I don't know what I did to deserve this, but MS Office refuses to uninstall Excel and Word. I think it may be a product validation thing. But I'm not sure. One thing tho, what does it want to validate if I'm wanting to REMOVE it?!

Anyway, I had a chance to take a quick look at Open Office Calc last night. It looks like every other spread-sheet software in the universe. I doubt I'll have much trouble making the jump from Excel to Calc. A bit like the way I adopted the spreadsheet in Documents-to-Go on Palm. I think 99% of the world doesn't use any of Excel's features anyway, so it's not like I'm going to miss anything.

Onto to Thunderbird - yes, I downloaded and installed it last night. And as I feared, I have no idea what I'm doing. It has an old "Microsoft Internet Mail and News" vibe to its simplicity. That's not the problem. The first problem is that it's ONLY that.

The search for extensions hasn't been very fruitful. I'm looking to totally replace Outlook2003 and the problem is that Outlook2003 is a total office-organization package. I need a Calendar, a way to do To-Do lists, a Notes function to make the equivalent of Post-It sticky papers on my PC, and finally a Contacts list that will be compatible with my cell phone's directory and my Palm device. Wish me luck.

The second problem is that Thunderbird is some odd quirks I'm not sure I like. For instance, there's a little triangle that tells the user which way a field is sorted. Yes, Outlook2003 had this too. But there's a problem with it: it's the REVERSE of what it was in Outlook! If the triangle points down, it means the items are sorted in descending order in Outlook, but the triangle points UP to mean the same thing in Thunderbird!

And thirdly... well, as I feared, not only am I missing Notes, To-Do lists, and Contact lists... well, I still haven't found a matching "conduit" for Palm Intellisync Lite to sync my Palm with Thunderbird. ~_~;;;

Help.