SoftMaker – Free office suite software
Posted on January 2, 2009 at 5:55 am
It seems like I am always writing about some new office suite software that is competing against Microsoft Office. The list of online office suites that I’ve written about is long: Google Docs, ThinkFree Office Suite, Zoho online Office apps, Adobe Buzzword online word processor, and Live Documents.
But that’s not all! There are several free desktop office suite programs too including Lotus Symphony, OpenOffice, StarOffice. So should I even bother adding another one to the list? Sure!
SoftMaker Office 2006 is a MS Word-compatible word processor and MS Excel-compatible spreadsheet office suite that is small in size and has a good number of features. The unique thing about this program is that it can run off your USB stick, which makes it a portable office suite.
OpenOffice can also run off your USB stick, but it’s way bigger than SoftMaker Office suite, almost 4 to 5 times larger because of all the other programs it includes.
SoftMaker Office is made up of two programs, TextMaker and PlanMaker. TextMaker is a feature-rich word processor that is fast, stable, and powerful. It can also read and write Word documents from version 6.0 to Word 2007. So you can use it to view and edit Word 2007 documents using TextMaker instead of MS Office.
It also has other cool features that you would find in a commercial word processor like MailMerge, spelling correction, built-in database, and more.
PlanMaker can read and write MS Excel files from version 5 to Excel 2007. It’s a feature rich spreadsheet application with more than 320 calculation functions. You can create charts and graphs with drawings, auto-shapes, word art, etc.
You can even use PlanMaker to create Excel-compatible charts that will be viewable by MS Office users. Other features include conditional formatting, goal seeker, syntax highlighting, sheet and workbook protection and more.
If you use word processing and spreadsheet programs casually, then SoftMaker might be the choice for you. It uses very little RAM as compared to Microsoft Office and OpenOffice and it takes very little space a USB flash drive, so you can use it on someone else’s computer. Enjoy! Source: LifeHacker
» Filed Under Free Software Downloads
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Most people don’t use 10% of what these suites are capable of. I like OpenOffice for a free app, but I currently use Microsoft Office 2007 because of the Outlook integration with my server.
I’ve been doing some testing on every word processor I could find in order to finish a very large document I started in Word. MS word canNOT complete the document! It can’t get it into pdf–tried acrobat and even word 2007 doesn’t do it with its new “save as pdf” add-in, it breaks the thousands of links I have in the document–they work in the document but aren’t published in PDF.
After all the software I’ve looked at I found SoftMaker’s TextMaker to be the most compatible with *.doc files, the fastest, one of the few that could handle the large complex size of my document, small foot print, and great exportation to pdf with forms if needed. Prior to TextMaker I had used Word, of course, and OOo for the past couple of years. Despite the many claims that Openoffice.org works well with *.doc files I’ve found that it can import them if saved in Word in the right format but you will never get them out looking correct–saving in *.doc or*.rtf from OOo writer has destroyed this document every time, adding usually about 100+ pages to a 900 page document not to mention formatting and hyperlink issues. I don’t think OOo is serious about being truly cross compatible with *.doc files; however, after using textmaker I can say they certain seem to be. Not to mention OOo strange way of doing things.
I suggest people give SoftMaker Office a shot if they need something that really does work *.doc files well and gives pdf export at a very reasonable price.