Clinton Fitch Reviews SoftMaker Office 2006

[Paul Martin]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.clintonfitch.com/reviews/softmaker/office-2006/default.asp' target='_blank'>http://www.clintonfitch.com/reviews...006/default.asp</a><br /><br /></div><i>"New to this version of TextMaker is "Track Changes" and annotations or comments. Track Changes is a powerful feature commonly used in business environments where multiple groups or individuals are reviewing a document. Essentially this allows for any changes made to a document to be noted and either accepted or rejected by you once you get the document back from the reviewer. As with other formatting features, Track Changes is synchronized with your desktop PC if you have the desktop version of TextMaker. Comments allow you to make annotations on a document pointing out something to the reviewer or the author."</i><br /><br /><img src="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/Clinton_Fitch_Softmaker2006.jpg" /><br /><br />I didn't realize it had been almost 4 years since TextMaker2002 was released! Certainly with the improvements in the Windows Mobile 5 applications, it's natural to wonder if a full-featured suite like SoftMaker Office is still needed. Clinton Fitch offers his answer in a full review of both TextMaker and PlanMaker. For those that have TextMaker 2002, have you upgraded or are you planning to upgrade to SoftMaker Office 2006?

[Airscanner]

Great review, thanks for posting! Very in depth and useful.

[TMAN]

What is the performance like with the new version? I seem to remember the previous versions beign very resource intensive.

[lapchinj]

I've owned TextMaker for both the desktop and PPC but I haven't used it in about 2 years. It was a very nice full blown word processor that I could even use on my Linux machines. But I've noticed that I didn't do any editing of documents on the PPC at all. The only writing that I've done on the PPC is mainly notes and that's either text or ink. I used it in the beginning but the only reason to have it (for me that is) is to edit on the PPC and use it as a replacement to MS Word and OpenOffice. So the bottom line became that I really didn't need another desktop word processor.

Reading a document prepared with any of the word processors is hard. I find that mostly anything that I read is either PDF or some document specifically formatted for the PPC.

I couldn't use it as a replacement for my word processors anyway. The defacto word processor by some clients is MS Word and that's what they wanted all their documents written in. As for most of my other clients and my personal work I use OpenOffice and save to odf which is being requested more and more these days since proprietary formats are becoming a no no. I used TextMaker a couple of years ago mainly because of the Windows / Linux connection and of course the ability to use it on the PPC. But OpenOffice sort of put an end to all that.

Jeff-

[Gerard]

I couldn't use it as a replacement for my word processors anyway. The defacto word processor by some clients is MS Word and that's what they wanted all their documents written in. As for most of my other clients and my personal work I use OpenOffice and save to odf which is being requested more and more these days since proprietary formats are becoming a no no. I used TextMaker a couple of years ago mainly because of the Windows / Linux connection and of course the ability to use it on the PPC. But OpenOffice sort of put an end to all that.


I'm not sure I understand; are some of your clients looking over your shoulder while you use a Pocket PC or PC, checking to see that you've used Microsoft Word to do your document editing? TextMaker saves to DOC format quite nicely, always has. Does RTF too, if that's what is needed. And of course it saves to TMD format if you want a little more efficiency... useful for a frequently edited document, where wait times are not desirable, then one may save the final version to DOC for sharing with whoever.

TextMaker now opens OpenOffice files. Doesn't yet save to that format, but I suppose it's not likely to take long before they get around to that feature too.

[kamikun]

Yea, I've gotta agree with Gerard here. If you do a lot of train or bus commuting, this program can be a life-saver.
I have more than a few times finished up reports in excel format or windoc format while on the way back from a business trip or heading up to the head office. Here, most long commutes are done on trains - and there's usually no room to fire up a laptop during the week.

And this latest release for the PPC was an absolute must-buy. With the addition of unicode support I can now switch back and forth between Japanese and English all on my trusty e800. The formatted document is ready for printing or emailing as soon as I get to the company.

Yes, if you are around a desktop all day then you may not have a need for this. But for mobile document creation and spreadsheet development... it is worth the price!

Despite what Clinton said, the formatting compatibility between Office and SoftMaker is not quite 100%. There are always bits that don't always line up and some of the special language formatting for Japanese (like furigana or top to bottom / right to left printing) may never be supported... but 95% is good enough for me.

[lapchinj]

...I'm not sure I understand; are some of your clients looking over your shoulder while you use a Pocket PC or PC, checking to see that you've used Microsoft Word to do your document editing?...
No nobody is looking over my shoulder but they were monitoring what was going into their document systems. In the end, as I had mentioned, it just became an issue of having another word processor around. I could never really use TM or any word processor to edit a document on the PPC. It just never worked for me. And no I was never able to edit source code on my iPAQ either. My iPAQ is used only for text, ink and to read manuals in PDF format although at the time I was using TM as a drop in replacement for Word on my iPAQ (for reading not editing).

When I had originally bought TM I did it because it was cross platform and there wasn't really anything good on the Linux side. At the time it did a great job in that I was finally able to take a doc file and edit on either platform. I was warned at some companies that anything that was submitted into their document systems had to be edited in Word. Since some stuff that I had taken out of those systems just didnt' go back so cleanly. I didn't investigate or try and figure out why there were issues, I just went back to word. No matter how great TM was (or is now) I had no reason to keep using it. I write code not documents.

Jeff-

[lapchinj]

Yea, I've gotta agree with Gerard here. If you do a lot of train or bus commuting, this program can be a life-saver.
I have more than a few times finished up reports in excel format or windoc format while on the way back from a business trip or heading up to the head office...
Yeah, but it just never worked for me. I still lug around my laptop everywere. Although PI is my default PIM on my iPAQ, it goes with me everywhere. I don't use my laptop for that - it just doesn't work for me :wink: .

Jeff-

[kamikun]

....- it just doesn't work for me :wink: .


Jeff, you used this phrase three times and I think I understand where you're coming from. FWIW if I were trying to use SoftMaker on a non-VGA 3.5 inch or smaller screen I too would find that "it doesn't work."

With a 4 inch screen at VGA resolution it's almost unusable.... I certainly would prefer a 5 inch or larger screen and a keyboard if possible. But it's just large enough to do serious work for short stretches - maybe 30 minutes at a time - but no more.

I know from other posts that Gerard uses an e800 also and that higher resolution probably makes all the difference. I seriously don't know how you could use the apps in QVGA... or on a smartphone sized screen no matter what the number of pixels.

Seriously waiting for HTC to introduce their Athena and / or Omni models at some sort of reasonable price point. :?:

[follick]

I upgraded from Textmaker 2002 to OfficeMaker 2006. It seems to run faster on my Toshiba e800 than the old version. I mostly used TextMaker 2002 on those rare, but important occasions when I needed to work with .DOC files on my PDA. I used PocketWord for day to day editing. TextMaker 2002 worked well, but it was too slow for most tasks.

I am currently trying OfficeMaker 2006 for my day to day text editing. So far it runs much faster.

The biggest problem I've had so far was in doing the installation of the upgrade. I installed it over TextMaker 2002. This left both versions of TextMaker (2002 and 2006) installed on my e800. There is no way to uninstall on the PDA. I also didn't have any way to uninstall TextMaker 2002 from my PC. I had to uninstall OfficeMaker 2006 from the PC. Then Install TextMaker 2002 on the PC and PDA. Then uninstall TextMaker 2002 from the PC and PDA. Then I reinstalled OfficeMaker 2006 on the PDA and PC. That's a little more complicated than it should be. There should be a way to uninstall the applications on the PDA itself.

[Paul Martin]

There should be a way to uninstall the applications on the PDA itself.

Agreed! A few times, I just did a manual uninstall, deleting the folders and shortcuts. I don't think I messed with the registry, however. Wonder if it's possible to uninstall using ActiveSync's "Add/Remove Programs" feature?

I haven't re-installed TM2002 on my Dell, but did have it as a backup on my older Jornada. There were a few times it really helped with formatting but for the most part, I work with simple documents. I've not personally made the leap just yet.

Paul

[lapchinj]

Jeff, you used this phrase three times and I think I understand where you're coming from. FWIW if I were trying to use SoftMaker on a non-VGA 3.5 inch or smaller screen I too would find that "it doesn't work."...
Yeah that makes a lot of sense I really haven't seen TM on anything else besides my iPAQ 4155 and earlier iPAQ's. My Dell x50v's never really worked out so I never even loaded TM on them. Seeing what's been said here I would have to have another look at TM when I find something to replace my iPAQ. I hope that will be before the summer. Even if I don't use it on the desktop I might finally have something to use on the PDA. The TM site mentions that it does import odf documents which would be nice.

Jeff-

[Nurhisham Hussein]

Agreed! A few times, I just did a manual uninstall, deleting the folders and shortcuts. I don't think I messed with the registry, however. Wonder if it's possible to uninstall using ActiveSync's "Add/Remove Programs" feature?

Tried it yesterday - it doesn't even appear there.

In any case, I've just gotten around to upgrading and I'm quite impressed. They run a little faster and the added features are pretty good. What really got me impressed is the Windows versions (I've never tried those before) - I opened a 60MB Excel file that gives OpenOffice the fits, and Planmaker handled it pretty well. It opened in under 30secs by my estimate (Calc took nearly ten minutes). About the only limitation I see is the reduced number of lines (65k rows in Excel and Calc, versus 16k rows in Planmaker), and no support for equation editing (as in Word) or TEX (as in Write).