A friend of mine is still using Outlook at home and I was wondering why he did not switch to a more secure email client such as Thunderbird. His response was that Thunderbird was missing a calendar and that this was a feature that he needed. I could not deny that there was no calendar in Thunderbird – until I found the Thunderbird extension Lightning. Lightning which is still in development adds calendar functionality (scheduling, tasks..) to Thunderbird.
The extension adds itself seamlessly into Thunderbird. The calendar uses the space beneath your inbox to display the current month and the latest upcoming events.
Clicking on a day loads the monthly view window displaying every day of the month and all the events that you already added to that month.
Right-clicking a day and selecting new event lets you add events to your calendar which can import and export the data into different clients. This is of course pretty useful if you have to use a different calendar at work or another workplace.
We have to use Outlook at work and I never thought of using Outlook at home as well. Lightning lets me use Thunderbird at home and sync the data of my works Outlook calendar easily.
Next to the monthly view window you can of course change to weekly or daily view to view a detailed view of those events.
Lightning for Thunderbird is a great extension that adds calendar functionality to Thunderbird. I would recommend it to everyone who missed that feature in Thunderbird.
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Hi,
I have seen your above posting and tried installing lightening into my Thunderbird. Its installed well. But the funtionality is not proper. When I click on Add button of Calendar tab, opens a dialog box and then nothing happens. The month view doesn’t work, i.e month view is not displaying anything. I am not able to get any kind of help in this. Help needed please.
hi,
how do you import a outlook calendar into lightning? could not find any instructions?
Lightning does not support Outlook calendar events what you have to do is open outlook, open the event and save it as iCalendar (*.ics) file, then you can import that file into lightning, very painful. if you need outlook calendar events I would say stick with outlook.