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I was designing an invoice last week for a friends business using Word. I hate the way Word formats everything and although I was pleased with the end result it took me longer than I would have liked. Still, before I sent it off to my colleague I cleaned up the final article and made it more printer friendly by converting it to a PDF which gave it a final polish.

There’s a number of PDF converters online though the one I’m using right now is the excellent PDF Online. One of the beauties of the (free) service is the simplicity and speed of it. Upload your document, enter your email address and bingo, you’re done. Your document is emailed to you minutes later. Brilliant.

I mentioned the Gmail for your domain service back in July last year and things have moved along nicely since and now come under the umbrella of Google Apps which include being able to offer users all the features of Google email and Calendar, Docs and Spreadsheets branded with your own domain name. The Google Apps Premier Edition sign ups remain free until the end of April so its a great service for clubs, schools, small enterprise and groups in either the premier (with 10gb email space per account) or the freebie edition.

Another new-ish feature for Gmail users (or at least some accounts, its still in beta, naturally) is the ability to download POP3 mail from other email accounts. In particular this could be useful if you own a few domain names and need to be able to send and receive mail from several accounts all in one place. At the moment you can add a further five POP3 accounts to your Gmail account. Used in conjunction with Gmail Manager its saving me a bunch of time by alerting me to not only my Gmail accounts but email from five separate domain names too.

To check if the extra POP3 features have been activated on your account open up your Gmail, go to Setting>Accounts> and look for “Get mail from other accounts (download mail using POP3)”. Its worth shelling out the $5.99 it costs for a domain name from somewhere like 1and1 to plug it in to your Gmail account to get all the benefits of the Google service but with your own personal name.

Stan Beer at Australian IT blog IT Wire today talks about a Windows version of Evolution the Linux desktop alternative to Microsoft Outlook.

“Evolution for Windows exists, it’s easy to install and it works! No sooner had the ink dried on an article I had penned bemoaning the fact that OpenOffice.org on the Windows platform does not include an equivalent to Microsoft’s Outlook, when a poster pointed me to a very exciting non-project.” Reports Beer.

Good tip. I’ve been happy with Thunderbird for around three years now but have started to miss having a built in calendaring client. So, this morning I added Lightning, the Thunderbird calendar extension (actually based on the stand-alone Firebird client) and downloaded Evolution for Windows to try both out. Both options seem less daunting than exporting my Thunderbird settings and mail back into Outlook.

Early impressions favor Lightning for me as Evolution for Windows is still very buggy right now with hung screens and such but its worth a look for early adopters and beta testers.

Related Reading

Evolution On Win 32 (Sourceforge)
Novell Drives Nail into Microsoft Office Coffin (IT Wire)
Export Thunderbird To Outlook (Broobles.com)
Importing Thunderbird Mails in Outlook and Outlook Express (Robert Peloschek)