Softmaker Office

Description

Though not as ubiquitous as the free open source community's favorite son - OpenOffice, the commercially developed SoftMaker Office has proven itself to be a more viable competitor to Microsoft Office.

Softmaker Office lacks a lot of the flaws we have experienced with other Office replacements. It is fast, first of all - snappier than Microsoft's Office. It looks good, with none of the strange font rendering issues we've seen with other programs. The icons on the toolbar are, for the most part, easily understood. The menu layout is familiar. It supports Multiple Document Interface, which can keep your taskbar uncluttered when working with many open files.

Though not as ubiquitous as the free open source community's favorite son - OpenOffice, the commercially developed SoftMaker Office has proven itself to be a more viable competitor to Microsoft Office.

The net result is a product that's a fraction of the size of its competitors (just 70MB on disk) and that runs great on underpowered hardware. SoftMaker Office's component applications -- TextMaker, PlanMaker, and SoftMaker Presentations -- load almost instantly, and each consumes roughly half as much memory as their Microsoft Office equivalents.

If you are looking to get away from Microsoft, want an inexpensive program that has most of the major functionality, and want something snappier under Vista than the bloated and oft-confusing MS Office 2007, it is worth trying out.