SoftMaker Office
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
SoftMaker Office is an office suite for Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, Windows CE, and the Pocket PC, developed since 1989 by the German company SoftMaker Software GmbH (Nuremberg). Up to and including the 2006 release, the proprietary suite included:
- TextMaker (word processor)
- PlanMaker (spreadsheet)
SoftMaker Office 2008, currently available for Windows and in beta for Linux, Windows Mobile, and Windows CE, adds two new applications:
- SoftMaker Presentations (presentation graphics, compatible with Microsoft PowerPoint)
- BasicMaker (a VBA-like programming tool)
SoftMaker Office has many functions of the correspondent programs from MS Office, OpenOffice.org or WordPerfect Office and also adds unique features such as its ability to run off USB flash drives and integrated reference works. It uses its own native formats and is highly compatible with Microsoft Office file formats. In comparison, it starts and runs much faster, needs less memory and processes also very large files without any problem. It can read and write Microsoft Office file formats as well as Open Document Format (word processor only), RTF and HTML. Multi-language spell-checking, hyphenation and thesaurus is supported; furthermore an integrated five-language translation dictionary (English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish). The user interface is based on Microsoft Office' look and feel; so it is easy to switch over. Noteworthy is the inexpensive academic pricing (for schools, universities, teachers, and students).
The developers of the project are trying to see if it is possible to port to Mac OS X but not a single concrete initiative has been made public in the four years that have gone by since this was first announced. [1]
