A free office suite for Christmas (and I don’t mean Open Office)
Open Office is good but it’s not great and several months ago a few people came to the conclusion that a relatively little known product called Softmaker Office was quite a bit better. This may upset some of you because Softmaker isn’t free software; it’s proprietary – but it is cheap! In particular, educational site licenses are ridiculously cheap. For $99 dollars you can buy a site license that will allow you to install it on any Windows machine in your school or university. For another $99 you can have it on every Linux machine! Unfortunately, there is no love for Mac users at the moment though.
So it’s cheap but is it any good? Well, why not find out? Between now and 31st December 2009, Softmaker are offering their entire office suite (word processor, spreadsheet and presentation) for free on both the Windows and Linux platforms. I’ve downloaded it and will be having a play with it over the festive period and I invite you to as well. I’d be very intersted to hear your thoughts on it.
Loads/closes itself and every type of office documents very, very fast, compared to both MS and OO. It seems to be made in native C++/Qt instead of OO’s Java and MS Office’s some crappy MS software framework…
But some excel sheets with some “strange” macros that I have are still incompatible with Office 2003, like OO is.
I personally tend to favour SSuite Office’s free office suites. Their software don’t need to run on Java or .NET, like so many open source office suites, so it makes their applications very small and efficient.
http://www.ssuitesoft.com