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As an office suit I use Softmaker Office.
It is not Open Source but I don't mind paying for something useful, yes it is much better than LibreOffice.

--
Teun

> SoftMaker gave away more than 60,000 copies of SoftMaker Office 2008
> over the holidays in a charity campaign. While that has officially
> ended, the download page is still active at http://www.softmaker.de/lh-down-en.htm

Thanks for the link - it still works and it does indeed handle .doc better than Open Office.

Maybe some almighty moderator will bother to actually mod your useful, informative post up. But I doubt it.

SoftMaker gave away more than 60,000 copies of SoftMaker Office 2008 over the holidays in a charity campaign. While that has officially ended, the download page is still active at http://www.softmaker.de/lh-down-en.htm

Free is better than 80 bucks, and SoftMaker Office is better than OpenOffice.org on so many counts, especially on netbooks.

There is a German company called Softmaker Inc. and they make a commercial but quite affordable Office alternative. It's available for both Windows and Linux.

http://www.softmaker.de/index_en.htm/

I haven't used this myself, but heard people who have used it talk about the software in the highest terms. Also, it appears that MS-Office format compatibility is far better than that of OpenOffice. Also, they sell professional fonts for Linux, too, so that alone will probably make the whole thing look much better. This may go a long way on its own.

Perhaps if you test drive this and show it to your boss, let him play with the Windows version for a while to prepare the ground etc etc, you might just get lucky and he might be more open to discuss Linux thin client deployment with the Linux version of them Softmaker folks' software as an alternative to MS-Office instead of OpenOffice. It may be worth a trial, I guess.

Also, how about running MS-Office via CrossOver on a Linux box. Not acceptable to your boss?

anyway, good luck.

... that small companies like http://www.softmaker.de/product.htm can do it. They have so much more resources.

Wait...

Man
The company is German !!
Just write to them and they will port it.
I mean its one country that port their software to Linux easily without a fuss:

SoftMaker
MainConcept
RibbonSoft

In earnest, is anyone using Microsoft Office XML for anything?

Martin Kotulla
SoftMaker Software GmbH

Many people are telling me that OpenOffice could be faster and less demanding on memory, and these are areas where our own products shine. Have you never wanted OpenOffice to start a little quicker?

My personal feeling is that even open source products are not beyond the realm of criticism in areas where they fall down. Mind you, I am seeing that our little PlanMaker/OpenOffice comparison page is causing the OOo developers to improve their product. So, even if you never use TextMaker or PlanMaker, you profit from our little row.

Apart from that, I am still convinced that open document formats are the way to go if we all (united and apart) want to break Microsoft's monopoly.

TextMaker (especially the upcoming 2005 release) and PlanMaker are indeed highly Microsoft Office compatible but there is so much legacy crud in the .DOC file format that we still receive documents from customers and start think "What the..., how was this created?"

-mk

See English or Portuguese article about the SoftMaker apps on AMD's PIC.

See English or Portuguese article about the SoftMaker apps on AMD's PIC.

Sounds cool. The Zaurii are great little devices. In combination with TextMaker for Zaurus (and hopefully the PlanMaker spreadsheet, too), this sounds like the perfect mobile office.

Then use PlanMaker for Linux instead. That program has no trouble opening and saving password-protected Excel files.

Now, many bad experiences people may have with OO are probably related to importing existing MS documents. Even though the filters are pretty good, they are obviously not perfect, and last I checked macros were ignored entirely. However, that is not a fair comparison -- Microsoft would utterly fail it, as they don't have the most basic OO import filter. And the complexity of this problem is similarly high as the one of emulating the Windows API on Linux - you don't just have to get the file format right, you also have to duplicate Microsoft's way of interpreting it, even if it's buggy and/or inconsistent.

Nevertheless, the developers are always working hard on improving import filters, as it is obviously essential to business migration. OpenOffice 2.0 will have improved filters, and it will also have much better database management with support for databases directly stored in files (as Access does).

OpenOffice is clearly more performance-hungry than MS Office, although in my experience that is mostly the start-up time. I don't anticipate major improvements in this area. If you're looking for a very slim MS Word replacement, KWord or AbiWord are probably projects worth keeping an eye on. TextMaker, a proprietary package, also exists for Linux. And if you're into DTP, Scribus is quite mature already.

We have TextMaker and are working on DataMaker and presentation-graphics package as well. PlanMaker is just one part of SoftMaker Office.

They've got TextMaker for word processing.

And with hires screens (640*480, yummy), you can actually see what you are editing.

But Microsoft and Palm are moving much too slowly. New features in PalmOS 5? It's ARM-compatible. New features in Windows Mobile 2003 SE? Landscape support. That's all! They should get off their a**es and improve the devices. What about putting more of the Windows API in Pocket PCs so that apps actually _get_ ported to Pocket PCs? What about speech recognition and dictation? What about making data replication work instead of relying on ActiveSync? etc. etc.

Make PDAs more useful and customers will buy them.

Is it lack of manpower or of imagination?

-mk

And with hires screens (640*480, yummy), you can actually see what you are editing.

But Microsoft and Palm are moving much too slowly. New features in PalmOS 5? It's ARM-compatible. New features in Windows Mobile 2003 SE? Landscape support. That's all! They should get off their a**es and improve the devices. What about putting more of the Windows API in Pocket PCs so that apps actually _get_ ported to Pocket PCs? What about speech recognition and dictation? What about making data replication work instead of relying on ActiveSync? etc. etc.

Make PDAs more useful and customers will buy them.

Is it lack of manpower or of imagination?

-mk

Actually, if you looked at the very top of the page, you'd notice that Slashdot only linked to the Linux beta page. There's a Windows version, plus a PocketPC version, and a Handheld PC version (whatever "handheld PC" means - I could only pull up the linked page, after that, the site died).

Of course, as to whether or not this will succeed - who knows. There probably is a market for 100% feature-complete Excel clone that runs on multiple platforms. You wouldn't believe how much Excel gets used in the buisness world - I've seen it used as a database before! It gets used a lot as a very powerful and very easy to use data storage and presentation tool. Plus the VBScript macros are very powerful - if a little on the slow side and annoying to write.

I'm currently writing an application in Excel. No, seriously. I'd rather use something else. (Anything else!) But the client wants to add some code to an existing Excel spreadsheet to get some added functionality. VBScript and Windows Forms allows me to do that job with just Excel. Of course, this ties the customer to Excel and Windows - giving them another option in the future that's cheaper than the Microsoft solution could very well gain customers.

Although I tend to agree - I doubt that this will have much effect against Microsoft or any of the other Linux spread sheets.

Actually, if you looked at the very top of the page, you'd notice that Slashdot only linked to the Linux beta page. There's a Windows version, plus a PocketPC version, and a Handheld PC version (whatever "handheld PC" means - I could only pull up the linked page, after that, the site died).

Of course, as to whether or not this will succeed - who knows. There probably is a market for 100% feature-complete Excel clone that runs on multiple platforms. You wouldn't believe how much Excel gets used in the buisness world - I've seen it used as a database before! It gets used a lot as a very powerful and very easy to use data storage and presentation tool. Plus the VBScript macros are very powerful - if a little on the slow side and annoying to write.

I'm currently writing an application in Excel. No, seriously. I'd rather use something else. (Anything else!) But the client wants to add some code to an existing Excel spreadsheet to get some added functionality. VBScript and Windows Forms allows me to do that job with just Excel. Of course, this ties the customer to Excel and Windows - giving them another option in the future that's cheaper than the Microsoft solution could very well gain customers.

Although I tend to agree - I doubt that this will have much effect against Microsoft or any of the other Linux spread sheets.

Actually, if you looked at the very top of the page, you'd notice that Slashdot only linked to the Linux beta page. There's a Windows version, plus a PocketPC version, and a Handheld PC version (whatever "handheld PC" means - I could only pull up the linked page, after that, the site died).

Of course, as to whether or not this will succeed - who knows. There probably is a market for 100% feature-complete Excel clone that runs on multiple platforms. You wouldn't believe how much Excel gets used in the buisness world - I've seen it used as a database before! It gets used a lot as a very powerful and very easy to use data storage and presentation tool. Plus the VBScript macros are very powerful - if a little on the slow side and annoying to write.

I'm currently writing an application in Excel. No, seriously. I'd rather use something else. (Anything else!) But the client wants to add some code to an existing Excel spreadsheet to get some added functionality. VBScript and Windows Forms allows me to do that job with just Excel. Of course, this ties the customer to Excel and Windows - giving them another option in the future that's cheaper than the Microsoft solution could very well gain customers.

Although I tend to agree - I doubt that this will have much effect against Microsoft or any of the other Linux spread sheets.

Don't miss the Pocket PC version as well! It supports everything that the desktop version does, unlike MS's own Pocket Excel, which barely does anything!

Extremely Word- and Excel-compatible, runs on multiple platforms (Windows, Linux, BSD, Pocket PCs, heck, they even showed a Zaurus port at the Desktop Linux Summit last week in San Diego...), fast as hell, great desktop publishing features. I like it.

Extremely Word- and Excel-compatible, runs on multiple platforms (Windows, Linux, BSD, Pocket PCs, heck, they even showed a Zaurus port at the Desktop Linux Summit last week in San Diego...), fast as hell, great desktop publishing features. I like it.

Abiword has come a long way recently so you might want to check it out again. TextMaker is very good if you want to exchange files with that other OS.

If just for the keystrokes, get TextMaker for Windows, Linux, Pocket PCs, or Handheld PCs. It has a WS keys emulation mode called "Classic". The closest to the diamond keys layout you can get these days and a damn fine word processor besides...

My company uses FreeBSD 5 on half of our desktop machines in the office. All the PCs for customer service and general-purpose use are all running:

• KDE 3.14 and its included apps
• the FreeBSD-native version of Opera
• the FreeBSD-native TextMaker word-processor
• Mozilla Firebird
• Everything like XMMS, Acrobat, and mplayer you know from Linux-land work just fine in FreeBSD

The fonts are anti-aliased and beautiful. I find it easier on the eyes than Windows or OS X.

It only takes us about an hour to set up a whole new ready-to-go office desktop PC for the office, using FreeBSD ports. And we LOVE that all boxes' apps are kept automatically updated every night using the portupgrade scripts.

If you're thinking of dabbling with FreeBSD as a desktop I can highly recommend it.

In fact I'm typing this on my Gateway laptop with FreeBSD 4.9 right now. Here are some FreeBSD laptop compatibility lists if you want to see if yours will work.

We have ported our TextMaker word processor to Solaris x86 (after Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, Pocket PCs, and Handheld PCs) but I am not sure if it is worth releasing it and having to support yet another platform.

So... is there a significant number of Solaris x86 desktop users?

Use TextMaker and PlanMaker instead. Really.

Use TextMaker and PlanMaker instead. Really.

A German company called Softmaker is also working on an Office compatible suite. They have the word-processor done at this point (TextMaker). The benefit for a lot of us is that there are Windows/Linux/FreeBSD(!) versions.

I had never heard of them either, but I gave the free trial a spin, and it's a heck of a lot faster than OO. The Word import capability isn't quite as good as OO, but it's more than acceptable for most docs (and being improved).

I'm not connected to the company in any way, but I am a customer of the Linux version.

GRH

- Wordperfect isn't being developed anymore, and the WINE port they did was not really well-received, to put it mildly.

- Abiword and Kword don't have enough features to make them viable for the office, and they don't provide good Word file compatibility.

- LaTex is great for those that know how to use it, but your typical non-tech person won't grok it.

- OpenOffice is too bloated for my taste.

- What's the point in running Linux when you use MS Office through WINE? It will be slow, resource-hungry and is cost-prohibitive.

The main points that TextMaker has going are:

- Fast (should launch in one or two seconds on most machines) and compact (if your WM is fast enough on your machine, so will be TextMaker).

- TextMaker provides solid MS Word compatibility, in quite a few cases better than OpenOffice or StarOffice.

- TextMaker is multi-platform: Runs on FreeBSD, Linux, Windows, Pocket PCs, Handheld PCs and soon Palm OS 5.

- Usability, usability, usability: Everything is where you expect it to be. Clean user interface, clean dialog box design. Text frames, picture frames etc. are shockingly easy to use. Mail-merge is a snap.

Get the trial version of TextMaker if you think this is just marktin' speak...

TextMaker promises "to seamlessly read and write Microsoft Word documents" but I haven't heard anybody's experiences with it. Has anybody here tried it?

TextMaker promises "to seamlessly read and write Microsoft Word documents" but I haven't heard anybody's experiences with it. Has anybody here tried it?

One of the most important things to be able to do, is saving in word format. However the trail d/l page says "Saving to Microsoft Word and RTF is disabled. Opening such files is possible, well...since I really cant pay money for something I cant test, I woun't even d/l the trail. To be fair, I've heard it's great stuff.

Then look into TextMaker for Linux, for Windows, and for Pocket PCs. Much faster than OpenOffice (it's even fast enough on a lowly MIPS-based Pocket PC...) and many more features than Abiword.

Then look into TextMaker for Linux, for Windows, and for Pocket PCs. Much faster than OpenOffice (it's even fast enough on a lowly MIPS-based Pocket PC...) and many more features than Abiword.

Then look into TextMaker for Linux, for Windows, and for Pocket PCs. Much faster than OpenOffice (it's even fast enough on a lowly MIPS-based Pocket PC...) and many more features than Abiword.

Excel maybe, but definitely not Word.

TextMaker for Pocket PCs and for Handheld PCs is many times better than QuickOffice, WordSmith, or DTG on the Palm. There is so much of a difference that it isn't even funny anymore.

I just hope that they port TextMaker for Linux to the Zaurus...

Excel maybe, but definitely not Word.

TextMaker for Pocket PCs and for Handheld PCs is many times better than QuickOffice, WordSmith, or DTG on the Palm. There is so much of a difference that it isn't even funny anymore.

I just hope that they port TextMaker for Linux to the Zaurus...

Excel maybe, but definitely not Word.

TextMaker for Pocket PCs and for Handheld PCs is many times better than QuickOffice, WordSmith, or DTG on the Palm. There is so much of a difference that it isn't even funny anymore.

I just hope that they port TextMaker for Linux to the Zaurus...

Then try TextMaker for Linux. That's one fast-loading word processor...and it's nice to have the same WP on Linux, *BSD, Windows, and my PocketPC.

Looks like there's ANOTHER office suite coming out of Germany ... this company is already beta-testing Textmaker, their word processor, and from what I've seen, it's much better designed than the OpenOffice WP. Oh, Textmaker's Word filters are much better as well.

Oh come on. If you haven't played with Textmaker on a Handheld PC or Pocket PC, you are not qualified to judge the quality of Wince apps. Textmaker for Pocket PC, HPC

It's word processor for HPC

If you want to get real work done on either of these, you should look here . Too bad MS doesn't ship this software with their wince systems.

The word processor is awesome, and the spreadsheet and database can't be far behind. Woohoo! I dusted off my old Jornada820 for that. First productive of my Jornada after, what, three years...

Someone obviously has worked out that problem: Full-featured word processor for Windows CE

The developers indicated they are working on a PocketPC version as well. Let's see how they fit the program to the PPC screen ...