In other words, it is a challenging compatibility test. It has card symbols, multiple tables, two columns, and if anything goes slightly wrong with the precise space occupied by the content in each cell, the document soon gets mangled. The formatting is tight as it must fit on two sides of A4. Is SoftMaker Office really better than LibreOffice for Microsoft Office formats? Your correspondent is a bridge player and there is Word document in circulation (with a million variations) that describes the intricacies of the game's conventions. Microsoft Office compatibility: Is SoftMaker better? SoftMaker has perhaps a tidier user interface, including the ribbon UI which LibreOffice lacks, but is behind on some features. Unfortunately for SoftMaker, the free LibreOffice is a capable performer and developing rapidly. But Microsoft Word does not run on Linux – well, not without Wine or other trickery, so this is another option there. It is good to support alternatives to products from huge corporations like Microsoft, but why use SoftMaker Office? This is being typed in TextMaker and little things like unnecessary hyphenation and inferior font rendering are obvious. There is even "New OLE Object" in the menu, in the Windows version, complete with Windows 95 dialogue styling, one of a few occasions where the product feels dated. Not much new then, but a quick spin with the suite shows that it has all the essentials these are feature-rich products. There are tweaks to footnotes, endnotes and cross-references, new navigation features, a few new functions in PlanMaker, and a new option in Presentations to create a standalone slide show. There is a new database module for mail merge which uses SQLite "in addition to dBase databases" (yes, this does feel like going back in time). There is integration with an open-source citation management system called Zotero. What's new in SoftMaker Office 2021? Not a great deal, it seems. SoftMaker FreeOffice is a capable free Office-compatible productivity suite.SoftMaker has options for both menu diehards and ribbon lovers Note that you need a personal serial code to use FreeOffice, which you can obtain here. The commercial version has a more flexible user-interface, including a dark mode, includes a 64-bit version, advanced document creation, advanced presentations and much more. If you need more, though, SoftMaker is hoping you'll upgrade to the commercial version, SoftMaker Office 2021, which can be yours from $99.95. If you're not a fan of the Microsoft Office ribbon then the SoftMaker FreeOffice interface may appeal, as it also offers a classic style (a ribbon is available an option) to the more conventional menus and toolbars.Īnd the suite has plenty of useful extra features, including a handy "Export to PDF" option on every File menu, and the ability to be installed on a USB flash drive. And reasonably accurately, too, although there are occasional problems with more complex documents. The package includes a word processor (TextMaker), spreadsheet (PlanMaker) and presentation tool (SoftMaker), and each of these can open both the old-style and Office 2021/365 files for their equivalent Microsoft application (DOC and DOCX/ DOCM/ DOTX/ DOTM, XLS and XLSX, PPT and PPTX, and so on). SoftMaker FreeOffice is a free Microsoft Office-compatible productivity suite.
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