new laptops - chapter 2 - which software?

new laptops - chapter 2 - which software?

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Some of you may have seen my earlier question, regarding the purchase of 2 new computers for my small practice (here’s the link: www.accountingweb.co.uk/anyanswers/question/what-do-you-think-laptop-my-practice ).

Well, the kit has now arrived. I have successfully installed the extra 4GB of RAM and checked the BIOS to see that it is loaded - hooray!

My next decisions are regarding the mail front end and the “MS Office” software.

Mail: on my “old” PC (all of 5 years – ancient!) running XP, I have Outlook Express. I like it. The 3-part user interface is great, showing the mail directories on the left hand side, the list of emails in the current directory at top right and the text of the chosen email at bottom right. As a secondary email I have gmail but I (and others) find this unfriendly. Does the team have any suggestions?

Office: I feel a real old fogey but I like Excel (and Word) 2002. Now that my new PCs will be running Win-7 Pro, I guess I have to move on. In a previous thread, Paul Scholes recommended (I think) Apache Open Office www.openoffice.org/why/index.html. Any thoughts/suggestions?

A cloud version is not particularly important for me. I tend to be office based.

Thank you.

Replies (6)

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By Captainblack
23rd May 2014 17:01

Suggestions

Some suggestions for you...

1) email. Outlook Express is long-since discontinued. If you want to stick with Microsoft products then MS Outlook is your answer. If you want a free alternative Thunderbird is a robust mail client which can be downloaded here http://www.mozilla.org/en-GB/thunderbird

Thunderbird can be configured to have the 3 pane view that you like, as can Outlook.

You can download and send GMAIL email using Thunderbird (as a second Account) and thus have all the benefits of GMAIL but use a local client.

2) Office Software

To be honest it's hard to beat MS Office though there are a number of free (sort of) equivalents.

Consider Office 365 which gives you a bundle of software (including industrial-strength email back-end) for a not unreasonable price. See http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb

The bundle includes Outlook, so this may be attractive if you want to be "all Microsoft".

Hope this helps!

Captain

 

Thanks (1)
Teignmouth
By Paul Scholes
23rd May 2014 22:57

Agree with Cap'n

I recently bought 365 as we needed it on 3 machines (all Macs) and it is hard to think of an alternativem however, if I was starting out again, I'd use all the Google stuff, especially when sharing docs & spreadsheets.

Full strength Outlook is what I'm used to but I do also use gmail alot.

By the way, Open Office was what I used on my Mac as a free alternative to Office.

Thanks (1)
Replying to lionofludesch:
Red Leader
By Red Leader
30th May 2014 11:37

update

Well.

Went with Thunderbird. Transferred over zillions of emails, addresses and the ISP details. However, I've now found that TB is slow. From a search on the internet, I can see that this is a common problem. The solutions offered all seem a bit too techy for me, so I think I will have to go for Office.

Office 365 seems to be the future. I think it gives me the 3-part email front-end that I like (folders - email list - email text). I also read that Open Office has some compatibility problems with MS files, so it looks like MS it has to be, seeing as all the attachments clients will send me will be MS.

So Office 365 for up to 5 PCs at £7.99/month.

Then to see if my Excel and Word 2002 (sic: not 2012!) files will load with it without any problems.

[EDIT] Assuming no space constraints, would I still need Dropbox if I went with Office 365? Not sure how the two would interact.

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Replying to Chris334:
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By Maslins
30th May 2014 13:39

Check the Ts&Cs

Red Leader wrote:

So Office 365 for up to 5 PCs at £7.99/month.

Then to see if my Excel and Word 2002 (sic: not 2012!) files will load with it without any problems.

[EDIT] Assuming no space constraints, would I still need Dropbox if I went with Office 365? Not sure how the two would interact.

A few things I think you should double check:

1) Office 365 subscriptions, my understanding is each user is allowed to install on up to 5 PCs purely for themselves.  If you're thinking you can get 5 separate people using office 365 for one subscription, I'm confident you'd be breaking their Ts&Cs.  I think it's more there so (for example) you might have a desktop in the office, a laptop for when on the move, maybe a tablet and occasionally access on your smart phone too.  5 seems excessive, but I guess they're future proofing!  We've got 4 users, and between us probably got the software installed on no more than 6 machines...but we pay 4 licence fees.

2) Office 365 does include a cloud storage facility.  However, we found that whilst the space in Gb was fairly generous, there was a low limit on file numbers, something like 5,000 I think.  Perhaps sounds like a lot, but for us, where we're paperless, we have a lot of PDFs for each client, copies of everything.  We're not a huge practice, but still manage to have >20,000 files, so we found it useless for our purposes.

Overall I was very disappointed with Office 365.  We still semi reluctantly use it and pay for it...but basically we're paying full whack just for Excel.  We don't really use any of the other extras, as for various reasons not of them work well for us.  However, as we use VT final accounts, and that requires a full desktop version of office, we have to pay the £££s.  Might move away from VT final accounts, but that'd be a sad day for me...plus I'm sure there'd be plenty of other things where we'd suffer without "proper" MS Excel.

Anyway, just a few things for you to ponder...

Thanks (1)
Replying to lionofludesch:
Red Leader
By Red Leader
30th May 2014 16:04

@Maslins

Maslins wrote:

Red Leader wrote:

So Office 365 for up to 5 PCs at £7.99/month.

Then to see if my Excel and Word 2002 (sic: not 2012!) files will load with it without any problems.

[EDIT] Assuming no space constraints, would I still need Dropbox if I went with Office 365? Not sure how the two would interact.

A few things I think you should double check:

1) Office 365 subscriptions, my understanding is each user is allowed to install on up to 5 PCs purely for themselves.  If you're thinking you can get 5 separate people using office 365 for one subscription, I'm confident you'd be breaking their Ts&Cs.  I think it's more there so (for example) you might have a desktop in the office, a laptop for when on the move, maybe a tablet and occasionally access on your smart phone too.  5 seems excessive, but I guess they're future proofing!  We've got 4 users, and between us probably got the software installed on no more than 6 machines...but we pay 4 licence fees.

Overall I was very disappointed with Office 365.  We still semi reluctantly use it and pay for it...but basically we're paying full whack just for Excel.  We don't really use any of the other extras, as for various reasons not of them work well for us.  However, as we use VT final accounts, and that requires a full desktop version of office, we have to pay the £££s.  Might move away from VT final accounts, but that'd be a sad day for me...plus I'm sure there'd be plenty of other things where we'd suffer without "proper" MS Excel.

That made me check and the MS website says share with up to 4 family members.

Why were you disappointed with Office 365. Slow? Why do you not use its Word component?

Thanks.

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Replying to SteveHa:
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By Maslins
30th May 2014 16:23

Why I was disappointed with Office 365

Red Leader wrote:

That made me check and the MS website says share with up to 4 family members.

Why were you disappointed with Office 365. Slow? Why do you not use its Word component?

Thanks.

Are those 4 family members in your business?  I dunno, your call...but I basically asked the same Q when I saw I could get the software on 5 PCs for 1 user licence, I was told hell's no, 4 users = 4 licences.

We do use Word...but could easily use any other (free) word processing package.  My point is Excel we couldn't get away with a copy cat product without tweaking some other things.

Gave a few reasons in my post above why I was disappointed.  I thought we'd migrate everything over to it, but half the things we tried encountered real problems.

Another one I didn't mention above is our email is all with GMail, we tried to migrate that over to Exchange...sure it can be done, but it proved a much bigger upheaval than I anticipated, wouldn't link with our CRM (Capsule) so we aborted and reverted to GMail.

Same thing with moving files onto Skydrive, 5,000 file limit made it of no use to our business.

Basically I was "sold" Office 365 on the basis it had a solution to all the IT sides of our business, email, storage, CRM as well as the basic Office software that's been around for yonks.  I was bitterly disappointed on almost every count.

I'm sure it works well for some businesses, but it definitely didn't for us.  All I need is to find some way of avoiding Excel and I'd cancel the subscription...so as it is I'm paying ~£30/month just for 4 PCs to occasionally use Excel.

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