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Softmaker Office: Free MS Office equivalent

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They claim it's much faster and has better compatibility, etc.

I downloaded a free version of it a while back, and really didn't use it much before reverting to OpenOffice.org (and I use the Go-OO version with Windows, as it has more features with better compatiblity). See http://www.go-oo.org for more info and download links. I eventually uninstalled SoftMaker Office to save space.

I also removed myself from their mailing list, as one way they make money is by offering an older version of the product for free, then send you advertisements for the newer products via e-mail on a frequent basis.

IOW, giving you an older version is a marketing tool, as they hope you'll like it and want to buy the newer version of it. Yes, it's nice that they're donating something to charity. But, it's still just marketing. :-)

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JimC
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http://www.pbase.com/jcockfield
 
I think it's a valid and ok marketing tool. Especially for companies with limited resources.

Back on topic, I think it's good that alternative "office" type titles are appearing. But I had never heard of it and was concerned that this was just some sort of branch from old OO souce code being sold due some technicality in the license.

I did read a few reviews just now, and the general consensus seemed that this is an original product with some interesting ideas, but still in a very early stage of development.

The consensus seemed that It might be adequate for light duty home use but not yet ready for office use.
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Now that you've judged the quality of my typing, take a look at my photos. . .
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Glen Barrington said:
Back on topic, I think it's good that alternative "office" type titles are appearing. But I had never heard of it and was concerned that this was just some sort of branch from old OO souce code being sold due some technicality in the license.
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Nah... SoftMaker Office is a different product (commercial versus open source), and it's not a fork of the open source OpenOffice.org project.

OpenOffice.org is open source, so there are a number of "forks", where other groups have taken the code and enhanced it and released a different open source product using it that source code.

Novell (recently acquired by Attachmate) and others have been enhancing the OpenOffice.org suite for a while, adding some features you don't get with the upstream version of OpenOffice.org. The Go-OO project I mentioned was one example.

A recent development is that LibreOffice was launched due to concerns over Oracle's stewardship of the OpenOffice.org project (Oracle acquired Sun). You'll see it mentioned on the Go-OO home page, as they're moving their resources to it.
Glen Barrington said:
"Go-oo joins forces with LibreOffice
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Glen Barrington said:
Go-oo shares much of its goals and philosophy with The Document Foundation's LibreOffice project, we're therefore supporting LibreOffice since it's inception, and are in the process of merging most of our patches over, as well as migrating to Document Foundation infrastructure. Going forward, the Go-oo project will be discontinued in favor of LibreOffice."
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http://www.go-oo.org

Here's where you'll find info about LibreOffice:

http://www.documentfoundation.org/

The first "stable" (i.e., production) release of LibreOffice should be out very soon. LibreOffice 3.3 RC1 was announced December 8th and is available for download now if you want to test drive the latest Release Candidate. Download links are here:

http://www.documentfoundation.org/download/

--
JimC
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http://www.pbase.com/jcockfield
 
-When using OO, you cannot save the file with a password if you save it in MS Office format. With Softmaker Office you can save it in .xls with a password for example. However, currently Softmaker Office cannot open OO files.

-Document tabs for easy switching between open documents in Softmaker Office

John
Glen Barrington said:
How does this compare to Open Office? It's also free.
--
I'm so bright, my father calls me son.

Now that you've judged the quality of my typing, take a look at my photos. . .
http://glenbarrington.smugmug.com/
http://www.jpgmag.com/people/glenbarrington/photos
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