Dumping MS-Office / Microsoft 365 and replacing with what?

Xiaomi Poco 3. Nice piece of kit. :+1:

I knew I hadn’t spelt it correctly :rofl: Middle son has one, although of course doens’t want dad tinkering with it and taking away his google crap!

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Does anyone know if the Poco 3 has got over the earlier Poco problem that VPN’s - not sure if on all O/S update versions or just some -simply don’t work on some Pocos. Was only going to keep buying Poco’s in future until I experienced that problem.

Thanks - that worked.
Previously I tried to export using Libre Office rather than Writer.

Also tried to export in EPUB format.
The formatting is out - can’t seem to handle tables properly, but it’s better at that than most doc/pdf > epub conversion utilities.

There are a number of known bugs with epub export, with a metabug report here :
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=114162

My advice is do whatever works for you.
Some people don’t seem to be able to live without the MS software stack, either because they use a particular specific function that isn’t found elsewhere that they feel they must have, or else because they don’t like change and moving to software where they would feel out of their comfort zone. I can understand that.

Sticking with Android, you would still have the Outlook for Android email client, and there are plenty of Android alternatives to MSOffice if you don’t want to pay a subscription.

Then again, there are a number of Android email clients that will work with a number of different email servers (you don’t mention which email server serves the email to your Outlook program). Off the top of my head: K-9 Mail, BlueMail, FairMail, ProtonMail, etc.

Still got my trusty Poco F1 I’m afraid, and when I feel anonymous surfing is appropriate, I use TorBrowser instead of a dedicated VPN, so have no idea about the F3’s quirks.

Does TorBrowser conceal IP address reliably? This may be what I’m looking for while I’ve still got my F1

This might help you decide.

As TorBrowser sets up a new Tor connection each time you launch the application, it is theoretically very good at anonymizing traffic. However, Tor isn’t infallible and is very much dependent on the quality and good will of the people who host the exit node servers. It also tends to be significantly slower, as virtually all traffic is encrypted.

Additionally, although by default TorBrowser comes with some fairly sane default options for browsing, it is possible to unwittingly leak some personal information through the use of extensions or add-ons that you might decide to activate, or options that you might turn on in the TorBrowser settings to have a more fluid web browsing experience, e.g. allowing Javascript execution from a website will in almost all likelihood reveal at least some information about you (your OS, possibly your IP address unmasked), depending on the code that is executed on the webserver. This can be as simple as allowing popups or redirects or testing the browsers architecture and version number for compatibility.

For sake of completeness, read this article too.

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Ta Ricepudding. Looks like I had better stick to my Samsung now for key things even though my Poco is much better

I’m presuming that the son doesn’t use VPNs but not sure really :rofl: :rofl:! I’ll ask him, I know he is very pleased with it.

I have been using Linux KDE Neon for years, ( after using windows and their beta versions as well - even windows 11 as a test ) Virtually all software is free.
For office I use WPS office ( again free )
Alternatively you can run MS office in a Virtual Machine, Under a program called Wine, or buy a product called crossover.
Linus updates in seconds instead of what feels like hours under windows, very unusall to have to reboot after an update as well. Takes less space, and boots quicker. I have converted many friend to linux now

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We have too!

I love how you plug a printer etc in and it just works it out, no faffing with cd’s in the old days (or do you still need to do that with Windows?).

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Have you tried Thunderbird?

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Hmm, that post seems to have disappeared.

It depends what Outlook functions were needed - it’s quite a bit more than an email client as it has various “groupware” stuff (shared contacts and calendaring for instance).

I use Davmail to bridge between Thunderbird and Exchange with reasonable success - at least for email.

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There is a product called Cube I believe - which does more or less the same thing as Adobe but is free.

Sorry - that should be CutePDF…

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Smallpdf was recommended by several kind posters on here and I have found it excellent for manipulating .pdf’s

Oh not tried that one, have recently installed something as I need to sign pdf’s for the centre de formation I’m working for when they send me a student. Thanks will have a look

I use pdf escape to do this.

You can simply drop a graphic of your signature onto the pdf, then save and download it.