Re: [LUG] Feel my pain

On 1 May 2013 19:02, bad apple <mr.meowski@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

Top posting, excuse me - a bit unavoidable as this thread is out-of-order already.

I do apologise, Mr Meowski, I hit reply in Gmail and typed without thinking.

Firstly, don't use Outlook for anything, ever - unless you're inside a MS enterprise shop with Exchange servers. It's not a mail program for consumers. Thunderbird will hook into everything so use that for your mail transfer needs, or hook into a locally setup IMAP server with a temporary account for migrating emails over.

Nothing wrong with Windows 8 apart from the usual "what's wrong with anything from Microsoft" arguments (I'll make no comment as to their validity). Don't use that Pokki crap, it's total shit-ware, I've just cleaned it off a couple of machines. If you must sort out the Metro interface thing, download and install Classic Shell from Sourceforge.

As I don't use Windows at all and very few of my customers have Windows 8 (yet), I have not really looked into this very much. I came across Pokki by chance; it looked interesting and useful. Classic Shell, however, fulfills both my interest in finding for others a potential resolution to the "Where's the Start Menu gone?" problem, and my interest in recommending Open Source first. Thank you. :)

Just ran into exactly the same problem - ended up installing Works. Office 2010/2007, even with the Microsoft-recommended compatibility/conversion packs do indeed fail to open Works documents... *rolls eyes* Libreoffice and I believe Openoffice will indeed open and convert them however, sometimes not as successfully as you might like though.

It sounds like someone is conflating Google Drive and Google Office, although I don't have a lot of experience with either of them - Google Drive is a sync tool like Dropbox or Skydrive, of course it doesn't "convert" anything, it's not supposed to.

That's funny... I've just gone through the "Upload file to Google Drive" option in the browser version and it popped up a dialog box asking about conversion. The Windows/Mac desktop/client software may not support conversion, but Google Drive (in a browser) most certainly does.

Run "PC Decrapifier" (http://pcdecrapifier.com/download) on shit-riddled OEM installs out of the box, that will save a lot of pain. Otherwise, it's really not difficult to migrate users between different windows systems, including win8: I do it all the time. I'm doing several right now actually, so if anyone needs more pointers, just ask. Note I'm not saying it's much fun, but it's not difficult.

Ooh, another fun bit of software. Thank you again. :)

Grant.