SoftMaker.com

Hi

I am slowly becoming an aficionado of Softmaker. Particularly since all the pundits of free software recommend Open Office or its derivatives. The fact is that at the macro level, Open Office et al, is a full suite of products, more so than Softmaker. At the micro level, Open Office is far from user friendly. Anyone who has tried (In Open office) to insert fields, print from those fields without blank address lines and mail merge is in for a pretty daunting, if not impossible task. More so with the setting up and printing of labels.

Softmaker, on the other hand via its Textmaker is not bad at inserting and printing fields, mail merge etc. Room for improvement yes. But not half bad at all.

Printing labels is a different kettle of fish, frankly Softmaker is amateurish and desperately needs improvement. None of these inane fixes via PlanMaker that are suggested in the forum. MS Office is much better in respective printing labels.


I HOPE...... that the Softmaker team does not make the same mistake that Open Office has made, that is going for the big picture + bloat to grab audience attention, whilst ignoring the simple day to day basics like, as above, the printing of labels. There are other examples I could quote about PlanMaker and Softmaker Presentations.

Remember moving forward in product development is a luxury you cannot afford, if you do not have the basics right.

Thank you, and keep up the good work whilst improving the basics.

Terry

I definitely second Terry's commentary.

As one that has had the "honor" of frequent knock-down drag-out fights with the latest OpenOffice (aka Ooo) offerings -- especially the brick wall that Ooo calls "mail merge", SM's TM2010's similar area is indeed a lot more refreshing.

Having said that, I do concur that the TM2010 label and mail-merge area could well improve -- and it needs to, even though it's obviously not as much a "disaster" that is seen in OpenOffice.

IMHO, TM2010's mail-merge and label area should be more intuitively functional than flashy, and yeat an appropriate amount of "pinache" -- defined as intuitive or with clarity -- would assist users to perform the mail-merge and label tasks.

By intuitively, I offer here that one definition would be "without HAVING to always go to the Help system to see how to do something."

One Possible idea:

It would NOT hurt TM2010 to have a simple graphic panel in the actual program screen that shows the various steps or a "road-map" to take to do it easily...and duplicate that graphic approach in the TM2010 Help system as well.

e.g., not only graphically (or pictorially) show how easily it can be done, but also, of course, MAKE the software code sequence/procedure that intuitive.

Joe