Hold Off Adopting Thunderbird For Android Devices!

Mozilla Thunderbird Icon

I recently was thrilled to see that Mozilla had finally released an Android version of their e-mail client Thunderbird.

I’ve been using it for a several weeks and don’t get me wrong, it has 1 or 2 issues, but in a general sense was good and I was planning on dumping my other e-mail clients.

However, during this same time frame, I started experiencing e-mail issues it which my e-mail provider was bouncing a number of my e-mails.  I’ve been on their case about this for the past few weeks.  I was informed they were using a mail analysis company, MailChannels, and it was them blocking my e-mails.

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Microsoft Outlook Alternatives

Let’s face it, with Microsoft’s ‘New’ Outlook removing VBA and lacking all sort of existing features that previous versions included, people are pondering their options.

As the ‘New’ Outlook slowly rolls out and is forced upon users, more and more I get phone calls from clients asking where this, where’s that, what happened, how can Microsoft do this … Sometimes I can help them out and other times I have to inform them that the feature no longer exists or that automation is no longer possible (just had that fun conversation earlier today).

Thus, there is little motivation to feel the same love of the product that we had for the Legacy Outlook and people are starting to consider alternatives.

Beyond my own clients, today I saw this post from an Access MVP Alum:

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Bye Bye Access TechCommunity Forum?

Microsoft Tech Community Access Forum

I thought it might be a glitch when I could no longer access the site yesterday, but now it has been confirmed by others as well (John left me a comment to the effect), the Microsoft Tech Community Access forum appears to be gone:

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/access/ct-p/Access_Cat

If you try to navigate to the above URL you get prompted to login and will eventually get redirected to:

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/

From there, good luck finding a way to navigate to Access, or Excel, ….

That said, I did manage to eventually find Access and it can be directly accessed via:

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/category/microsoft365/discussions/access

If you really want to know how to locate it, here you go:

  1. Navigate to https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/
  2. From the header menu click on the Products drop-down and select Microsoft 365
  3. Click on the Discussion Spaces tab
  4. Click on the Show More button
  5. Click on the Access card

Microsoft couldn’t have made it any easier! 🙄
 
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Generate a CSV From an Excel Column of Data

Every once in a while I am provided data from client in Excel and want to use that information in SQL (SSMS, MySQL, …) to build some WHERE clause in a query. So I go back and forth, copy/paste, over and over. It’s tedious and time consuming!

There has to be a better approach.

Now, if you’re running Excel 365 then there’s a new function you can actually employ TextJoin(), but I’m not going to be discussing that here.

I wanted, needed, a universal solution for when on-site at clients, some of whom are running Excel 2003.

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Using ExifTool in VBA to Work With File Exif Meta Information

A while back I published a several articles about working with images and other files to read/write Exif meta data:

Well, while I was developing all of those techniques, I kept seeing mentions of ‘exiftool’ which is a standalone program designed by Phil Harvey to specifically work with Exif file information.  So today, I thought I’d show you all how we can take advantage of this tool via VBA.
 
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Reverting Back From the ‘New Outlook’

If you didn’t see my last post:

The 'New Outlook' A Total Disaster
I don’t know what is going on in Redmond, but this is getting to be ridiculous! I was working on a PC which the user had Windows Mail as their E-mail client. He’s always dismissed the prompts to switch to the ‘New Outlook’. That said, sadly, after a recent update he found himself with the ‘New Outlook’ as his e-mail client. Now, I’ve seen, in the past, a button was available to revert back to your prior application, but nope, not in this case, no slider button appeared. He had no choice, Microsoft unilaterally imposed the ‘New Outlook’! Now, as…

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I’ve been trying to help a client upon which Microsoft imposed the ‘New Outlook’.

Now, I did end up setting them up on Mozilla Thunderbird.  It’s a really solid e-mail client, one that I’ve set up for various clients for years now which can do the typical Outlook stuff (E-mail, Contacts, …).

That said, I kept digging because, in the past with other clients, I had always managed to revert back to Outlook (or as Microsoft is now labeling it ‘Classic Outlook’).
 
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