I was wanting to send this to Susan Bradley, in response to her suggestion about using T’bird as Outlook replacement, in latest AskWoody newsletter, but an not finding any way to direct letters to individual writers. No matter, its worth having this discussion here.
At least once a year I wish that I could find a substitute for Outlook, and then stop using the rest of the Office suite (only Word and Excel, really). I have looked at using T’bird. I tried installing it. I gave up.
-every step required another addin. Want folders? find an addin. Want to arrange the order of folders? Need another addin. One after another. Which required research to find the appropriate addin, research to compare them, research to figure out if the addin is compatible with the current t’bird version. Research to figure out how to use the addin. etc etc.
-I use contacts (stored locally, not stored at Onedrive) in Outlook, with notes field to store info about contacts. The t’bird contact (can’t remember, another addin?) module doesn’t allow for the range of info, quantity of phone numbers that is common for people currently, addresses, partner name, etc . And the field mapping to move info from Outlook to T’bird is extremely clumsy, unintuitive, and would take days to work through, while still losing some of the data currently in Outlook.
-I use the calendar in Outlook, which syncs with exchange, which then syncs with Iphone and other computers. With the experience I already had trying to get t’bird set up to simply handle email, and contacts, I couldn’t imagine how I would get t’bird to handle calendar function (another addin!) for me. Plus, seemed that I would lose years of calendar history.
I have had people suggest t’bird in the past. Upon asking, I found that they didn’t actually use it themselves. If I am wrong about all or most of this, I am happy to hear how; what it is that I am overlooking, or how to avoid the difficulties I experienced.
