Verdict:
Can two things be a suite? Here's a rather decent little office, erm, pair. Both applications are really good, but two programs for £48 isn't particularly good value.
Appearances can be deceptive. SoftMaker is a relatively little-known office suite that consists of only two programs: a word processor and a spreadsheet. And it costs £48 - more than Microsoft Works, or Sun's StarOffice, which comes with all four major office applications. But don't write it off just yet.
TextMaker's menus are non-standard, by which we mean nothing like Microsoft Word. We tried not to hold this against it, which would have been easier if some of the options hadn't also been hidden in odd places. The spellchecker, for instance, was under Extras. It's not really an extra, since nobody would buy a word processor that didn't have one. Once we found our way around, however, it was well worth the effort. TextMaker
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opened our Word document and kept all of its formatting, the only non-Microsoft program to achieve this. That spellchecker worked perfectly. We generated an index and a table of contents without any difficulty, though to update these tables we had to generate them again from scratch. The mail merge function was easy to use.
Best of all, TextMaker offers straightforward desktop publishing features. We created two text boxes, linked them so the text flowed from one to the other, then inserted a picture exactly where we wanted it. You place the picture inside a frame and manually adjust the border around it, and then, unlike in most word processors, everything stays exactly where you put it, until you move it. Brilliant.
To our astonishment, PlanMaker, the spreadsheet, preserved the cell grouping in our Excel document, the only non-Microsoft spreadsheet that managed this. It also successfully imported every one of our formulas, and completed all our basic and advanced maths tests, and did a very good job of recognising all the Excel formulas we tried. It also has an excellent chart and graph making tool, by far the best we've seen in a budget office suite.
Overall, SoftMaker's suite is well worth a look. The only catch is that it's quite pricey for the relatively small set of programs it offers.
By Karl Wright
SPECIFICATIONS:
Requires: Windows 95/98/Me/2000/XP/Vista, Pentium processor, 32MB RAM
