A powerful alternative to MS Office
Microsoft Office has always been the undefeated standard when it comes to office suites and productivity tools. No matter how much developers try, they always seem to fall short of Microsoft Office’s multitude of features and functions. SoftMaker Office is another office suite that’s going to try to take down the juggernaut. With its similar interface and feature offerings, can SoftMaker prove that it’s more than an imitation? Should it be taken seriously as a legitimate competitor against Microsoft Office?
TextMaker
TextMaker is the SoftMaker Office’s answer to Microsoft Word. It has a similar design to MS Word, and it pretty much has all of the core functions you’ll need from any text editor. Thankfully, SoftMaker made TextMaker compatible with MS Word, so there’s no need to worry if you’ve been using Word primarily before switching to SoftMaker.
TextMaker also comes with a spell-checker which supports over 75 languages, a word-counter, and a thesaurus. It also supports edit sharing and comments, as well as various design options.
PlanMaker
This is SoftMaker’s Excel equivalent, and SoftMaker is not only unconcerned about the comparison with MS Excel, but it also seems to be counting on it. PlanMaker’s best asset is its similarity to Excel. As with TextMaker, old MS Office users can boot up PlanMaker and be completely at home because Excel and PlanMaker have very little difference. You can also load up your old Excel worksheets directly onto PlanMaker.
PlanMaker features pivot tables and easy data filtering, as well as formula auditing and syntax highlighting. You can also design your worksheets to make them more pleasing to the eye because PlanMaker also comes with a lot of design options.
Presentations
Finally, we have Presentations, which is SoftMaker’s version of MS Powerpoint. Just as it was in TextMaker and PlanMaker, Presentations is compatible with MS Powerpoint as its default file format is PPTX. Presentations is very easy to use. For users who don’t want to do any designing, they can choose from the multitude of templates Presentations has by default. However, they can also create master-pages in order to ensure that their presentation is uniform.
Presentations also has a lot of animation options for slide transitions and other effects. Users can also add music, tables and charts, and TextArt. Presentations also has a presenter view where users use two monitors when presenting. One monitor shows the presentation itself while the other monitor allows users to do other stuff while presenting.
Good Alternative, No Competition
SoftMaker Office doesn’t really compare to Microsoft Office like all the other office suites out there. Unfortunately, while it looks similar, it’s still lacking a lot of the additional features that make MS Office really great. However, it doesn’t seem bothered by that and it actually embraces compatibility with MS Office. You can definitely choose SoftMaker Office as a worthy alternative, but be aware that it’s just no MS Office. I won’t give it too much grief for that because, on its own, it is a very solid suite that will serve its users well.
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