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  • orrery
    orrery Posts: 798 Forumite
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    EssexExile wrote: »
    The post you're replying to was written in the dim & distant past! Well, nearly two years ago anyway. ;)

    To be fair, Skype hasn't improved much. My son and I both have 68Mbps fibre connection and it is pretty hit and miss if you try to go cross platform, although PC to PC is OK. Anything involving iPhones and/or Android frequently results in the call not being received.
    4kWp, Panels: 16 Hyundai HIS250MG, Inverter: SMA Sunny Boy 4000TLLocation: Bedford, Roof: South East facing, 20 degree pitch20kWh Pylontech US5000 batteries, Lux AC inverter,Skoda Enyaq iV80, TADO Central Heating control
  • HHNN
    HHNN Posts: 15 Forumite
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    Hallo
    Any tips on software for writing and copying sheet music? I believe Sibelius is the brand leader.
  • Marty999
    Marty999 Posts: 728 Forumite
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    I have used Muzescore, it's a free program and pretty good: https://musescore.org/
  • silverfox50
    silverfox50 Posts: 7 Forumite
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    My office 365 with Microsoft is expiring in a couple of days so i have been looking at all the great free downloads on MSE. What would be the best one particularly as I want to mirror my Microsoft Outlook. Also if I don't renew with microsoft will I loose outlook and all my folders-thanks all
  • John_Gray
    John_Gray Posts: 5,823 Forumite
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    There isn't a non-Microsoft equivalent to Outlook.
  • murphydavid
    murphydavid Posts: 832 Forumite
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    edited 22 February 2018 at 5:52PM
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    silverfox50 wrote: »
    My office 365 with Microsoft is expiring in a couple of days so i have been looking at all the great free downloads on MSE. What would be the best one particularly as I want to mirror my Microsoft Outlook. Also if I don't renew with microsoft will I loose outlook and all my folders-thanks all

    Thats a hard question for those of us who only use free software because we have never used outlook and don't know its full capabilities. Is outlook an email application that stores emails locally with a diary application attached? If you say what you will want to do if you decide not to pay for outlook then people may be more able make suggestions. For email stored locally you could use yahoo mail linked to Mozilla Thunderbird both of which have free versions. For Diary and notes etc you could try the complete Google package (or parts of it) which is also free (or at least the bits I use are) see https://www.google.co.uk/webhp?gws_rd=ssl and click on the square of sqares top right (google apps)
  • orrery
    orrery Posts: 798 Forumite
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    silverfox50 wrote: »
    My office 365 with Microsoft is expiring in a couple of days so i have been looking at all the great free downloads on MSE. What would be the best one particularly as I want to mirror my Microsoft Outlook. Also if I don't renew with microsoft will I loose outlook and all my folders-thanks all

    LibreOffice with give you an Office Suite that does Word/Excel/Powerpoint equivalent and will handle the same document formats. Thunderbird will handle your mail and is streets ahead of Outlook, which in my view is one of the poorest MS pieces of software ever released.

    It is all a matter of getting used to the new packages. Unless you are a serious power user, these packages will do everything that Office will do, and they won't go out of date - they just keep being updated with the latest features.

    My Thunderbird mirrors 3 email accounts on several different machines, one laptop is left on permanently and filters out all my spam, which is then mirrored on the other machine and my phone and tablet.

    LibreOffice handles spreadsheets fine - one of mine has about 20 sheets with charts on each. I prepare presentations for talks I give in schools with it - all fine.

    The only reservation with LibreOffice is that if you keep transferring from MS Office to LibreOffice and back the formatting of documents can go slightly out.
    4kWp, Panels: 16 Hyundai HIS250MG, Inverter: SMA Sunny Boy 4000TLLocation: Bedford, Roof: South East facing, 20 degree pitch20kWh Pylontech US5000 batteries, Lux AC inverter,Skoda Enyaq iV80, TADO Central Heating control
  • polymaff
    polymaff Posts: 3,904 Forumite
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    orrery wrote: »
    LibreOffice with give you an Office Suite that does Word/Excel/Powerpoint equivalent and will handle the same document formats. Thunderbird will handle your mail and is streets ahead of Outlook, which in my view is one of the poorest MS pieces of software ever released.

    It is all a matter of getting used to the new packages. Unless you are a serious power user, these packages will do everything that Office will do, and they won't go out of date - they just keep being updated with the latest features.

    LibreOffice handles spreadsheets fine - one of mine has about 20 sheets with charts on each. I prepare presentations for talks I give in schools with it - all fine..


    That good, eh? Tell me how you customise the X axis when the X variable is a number.


    No replies yet from Libre. Very unimpressed.
  • orrery
    orrery Posts: 798 Forumite
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    edited 31 October 2019 at 7:08PM
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    polymaff wrote: »
    Tell me how you customise the X axis when the X variable is a number.


    Can you explain? What specifically do you mean by customise?


    My X axes are usually dates, but I've just created one with a number series and double clicking on the X axis brings up the usual options and settings - reverse, log, and un-clicking the 'auto' settings allows customisation of the various parameters.
    4kWp, Panels: 16 Hyundai HIS250MG, Inverter: SMA Sunny Boy 4000TLLocation: Bedford, Roof: South East facing, 20 degree pitch20kWh Pylontech US5000 batteries, Lux AC inverter,Skoda Enyaq iV80, TADO Central Heating control
  • polymaff
    polymaff Posts: 3,904 Forumite
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    edited 31 October 2019 at 9:05PM
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    Thanks for the quick response. Customise - as in change the nature of the X-axis, particularly the scale parameters

    Here's the query sitting with LibreOffice - which starts with an (italicised) quote from Libre's own help system:

    Quote:

    " For some types of axes, you can select to format an axis as text or date, or to detect the type automatically"

    The scale options are "automatic", which, as expected, has no options, "text" which, surprisingly, has no options and "date" which has excel-like options - for dates.

    Surely there should be a numbers category with the sort of options I get in Excel for formatting max, min, major, minor etc - for numbers?

    It's a stacked bargraph, accordimg to Excel, by the way, with each bar accumulating about a dozen values. Looks absolutely right in Excel, just a mess in LibreOffice Calc 6.3.2.2

    End of Quote.

    The Libre "help" stuff I quote seems to confirm that you can only alter numeric data when it is meant to represent a date - which is true.

    What "automatic" delivers is just a mess of overlapping digit characters. Y-axis is OK, btw, which leaves me wondering what other fundamental gaffes I'd come across if I tried to migrate from Excel to Libre (or, come to that, Apache - which has the same fundamental limitations).

    Looks like the only Excel alternative - is Excel.
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