SoftMaker’s SoftMaker Office 2006 is a low-cost full-featured office suite available for Windows, Linux and Pocket PC handhelds. Its applications are compatible with Microsoft Office file formats and work well on older hardware, which could make it attractive for firms with a diverse, multi-platform environment.

SoftMaker Office 2006 consists of two applications: the TextMaker 2006 word processor and PlanMaker 2006 spreadsheet. The Windows version and the Pocket PC version are available now but the Linux/FreeBSD version is still in beta.

SoftMaker Office is unlikely to tempt large firms away from Microsoft Office, but its low system requirements could win it a niche for basic productivity work in departments using older systems or running Linux on the desktop.

A notable feature is its consistency across platforms; a user moving from the Windows version of SoftMaker Office to the Linux one will find little difference. And the Pocket PC version has much of the functionality of the desktop suite, so users can open documents created on a PC without losing formatting.

We looked at the beta version of SoftMaker Office 2006 for Linux, and found we could open, edit and save Microsoft Word documents and Excel spreadsheets without any problems, even with complex spreadsheets containing formulas and charts. We could also access OpenDocument text and spreadsheet files as well as SoftMaker’s native .TMD and .PMD formats, and both applications allowed us to convert files to PDF documents.

We tested the beta of SoftMaker Office 2006 on a PC running Ubuntu Linux 6.06 LTS, and found the install needed a few tweaks. We were able to download the suite as a Gzipped tarball file (.tgz) and unpack it using the File Roller archive manager that ships as part of Ubuntu’s Gnome desktop environment. But this did not put in place icons or shortcuts to the apps, which we had to add manually.

Like many productivity suites, SoftMaker emphasises its compatibility with Microsoft applications, and both TextMaker and PlanMaker can be set to save in Office file formats by default.

TextMaker 2006 adds a Track Changes feature, compatible with Microsoft Word to the extent that changes made in TextMaker show up if a document is reopened in Word, and vice versa. It also boasts new drawing tools compatible with Microsoft’s Autoshapes. Our only quibble is that TextMaker’s word count function is hidden in a tab on the Properties option of the File menu. PlanMaker likewise appears to handle Excel files well, and has some interesting features of its own, such as drawing tools that can be used to create flow and organisation charts on a worksheet.

SoftMaker Office 2006 for Linux runs on any PC distribution with version 2.2.5 of the GNU C Library or higher and any X Window manager, which means pretty much any current desktop Linux.

The Windows edition runs on Windows 95 and upwards, while the Pocket PC version works on any ARM-based Pocket PC or Pocket PC Phone Edition device.