On Day 1, I took the plunge from Windows 7 to Ubuntu 11.10. We walked through installation, email, calendaring and skype. Today we’ll tackle the following:

  • Convert Outlook archive .pst’s to Thunderbird.
  • Libre Office Write and Calc
  • Fix default application for Office 2007+ formats
  • Windows network shares

Outlook .pst files to Thunderbird

Moving from Windows 7 and Microsoft Outlook to Ubuntu and Thunderbird does have a few challenges. One of those is that if you had local .pst files for local message and archive stores in Outlook, Thunderbird can’t understand them. Thankfully I had already tackled this a few weeks ago as I new it was something I would need to conquer if I was going to make the switch.

So as not to double post, I will refer you to the detailed article I already wrote regarding the procedure here.

Figure 1.

Once the conversion process completed there were a few quirky things that popped up. One issue was that when doing a search across all email I would get results from long ago. When I clicked the aged result the email would not come up. Funny, I thought. After a bit of playing I found a solution.

While in Thunderbird, I found that if I right-clicked on one of those archived yearly folder and went into the properties there were some interesting options. The one that helped me was to choose the “Repair Folder” option. This would take 15-20 seconds to complete on some of the folders but when done, I could view the old email messages in the search results without issue.

Libre Office Write and Calc

If you come from the Microsoft World, you are most likely coming from the use of the Microsoft Office suite of products as well, including MS Word, MS Excel, MS PowerPoint, MS Access and more. In the the 11.10 version of Ubuntu you will find the Libre Office suite already installed.

If you are not already aware, here is the breakdown of equivalence:

MS Word        ->    Libre Writer
MS Excel       ->    Libre Calc
MS PowerPoint  ->    Libre Impress
MS Paint?      ->    Libre Draw
MS Access      ->    Libre Base (not exactly, but kinda)

Again, thinking about my immediate productivity, I need to see about equivalents for MS Word and Excel. As such, it’s time to review compatibility of LibreOffice Writer and Calc.

We have a mixed use environment of Microsoft Office versions. We have MS Word files in both .doc and .docx formats. For Excel we have .xls and .xlsx formats. If I’ll be communicating and working with other office staff, all on Windows 7 and using Microsoft Office tools, I need to ensure they never know I’m using another tool.

So, I open the nautilus file manager and navigate to my Home folder. Down into Documents I dive looking through those wonderfully restored files from day 1. Aha! I spy a .xls spreadsheet that I know has multiple linked worksheets. Double click and it is opening in LibreOffice Calc. A quick review of numbers, linked cells and all and everything looks good.Changed some cells, saved and I was prompted on whether to keep in the current format or change to ODF. If I want MS Office users to be able to open it, I better keep the current format. Finally I sent the spreadsheet to a colleague, with the warning that more are coming, so they could test opening them in MS Excel and make sure all is right with the world.

Next I needed to do the same things with an .xlsx format. Double click and what’s this? Archive Manager? Yup, for some reason the Archive Manager was attempting to open my .xslx files. After a bit of poking around I realized that for some reason the Archive Manager was set as the default application for .xslx files.

Figure 2.

This was easy enough to fix. In Nautilus file manager I right clicked on a .xslx file and chose the properties menu item.

From there [see Figure 2.] you will notice that the Archive Manager application is currently set to the default for this file type. Click and highlight the LibreOffice Calc option and then click the Set as default button.

Doing this changes the default file association for .xslx files. From now on, double-clicking an .xslx file will result in the file opening automatically in LibreOffice Calc.

I found that the same problem existing with .docx files as well. The same fix, only this time selecting LibreOffice Writer as the default, solved the issue.

As I went through various .doc(x) and .xls(x) files, all of which are fairly straight forward, no massive macros or VBA code, everything looked good. My colleague, who was by now tired of receiving and testing files, found no issue either. Phew! That’s another one off the list.

Windows File Shares

Working in a Microsoft Windows shop, there are plenty of network file shares on Windows servers. I’ll need to be able to get to all those mapped drives and shares also. Again Ubuntu makes this pretty straight forward. Windows file shares are accessed via SMB protocol. Like most things, there is more than one way to get to those file shares. One is to use Nautilus and browse the network to find and access those resources. Another is to go directly to them is you know the path to the shares. In my case, I chose the latter.

Figure 3.

Opening Nautilus, I chose the “Go” menu item and selected “Location”. In the location bar I typed SMB:// and then the UNC path the network resource I wanted to access.

smb://servername/sharename

Doing so and hitting the enter key then prompted me for my Windows credentials. I entered my Active Directory user name, domain name and password. You can then select how long those credentials are used. At this point I selected the “Remember password until you logout” option. You can make you own assessment of what is right for you.

Figure 4.

Now that I have access the file share, I want to bookmark it so I can quickly get back to this location. Again in Nautilus, I chose the Bookmarks menu item and then Add Bookmark (Ctrl + D). This adds the current location to the bookmark menu. Now, to make it a friendly name, right clicked the bookmark and chose the rename option. Since some of these corresponded to mapped drives in the Windows world, I gave some of the bookmarks single letter names to match the previously drive map letters.

Rinse and repeat as my ladies would say.

Day 2 is getting along fine. No major failures or inability to be productive. So far so good. Tomorrow I’ll play with customizing the environment a bit to personal tastes and anything else that comes up.


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