What the press says about SoftMaker Office

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Kiss Microsoft Office Goodbye: It's a New Year, time to break bad old habits and make vows to live a better life. I can't help you lose weight or stop smoking, but I do have one suggestion: Break the habit of using Microsoft Office.

[...] I've tested all three suites for compatibility with Microsoft Word and Excel by making up fairly complex documents and then importing them into the corresponding alternative applications. The imported documents contained charts, text and picture boxes and drawing objects.

By and large, they all did well on relatively simple documents. On more complex documents, SoftMaker Office, the product of a tiny software company based in Germany, really stood out. It did a great job importing graphics and tables that tripped up OpenOffice and Zoho.

Why spend $279 on Microsoft's behemoth Office 2010 suite when you can get a slick, lightning fast alternative – SoftMaker Office – for less than one-third of the price?

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The better Office alternative: SoftMaker Office bests OpenOffice.org.

SoftMaker Office shows superior compatibility with Microsoft Office formats, while OpenOffice.org 3.1 falls flat.

With its TextMaker application, SoftMaker has achieved what the combined forces of Sun Microsystems and the whole of the free open source community could not: reliably exchanging data files with Microsoft Word.

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It's stable, capable, and lightweight, but its crowning feature is still its superior file format compatibility with Microsoft Word.

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SoftMaker Office represents an improved, more powerful Microsoft Office 2003, but built with ease and speed at every turn in its interface and engine.

Most people will want exactly that, especially those not willing to relearn everything with Microsoft Office 2007.

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Imagine taking the best and most-used features of Word 2003, vastly expanding its document creation power, and throwing in a healthy dose of perfectionism throughout the user interface. Forget your imagination and just check out TextMaker. I'm betting you'll love it because it will never slow you down.

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You won't find a more Excel-compatible spreadsheet on any operating system, but Microsoft compatibility is far from PlanMaker's only worthwhile feature.

PlanMaker is both smaller in size and faster to start than most of the other spreadsheet applications I've used. One particularly data-heavy test case with a single large chart took only 10 seconds to load, while the same worksheet took more than a minute to load in StarOffice 7 Calc.

Compatibility with other programs is where PlanMaker really shines. SoftMaker has a page detailing its Excel compatibility features. While you have to take a manufacturer's propaganda with a grain of salt, my own analysis of the test cases shows them to be completely accurate and as-advertised.