SoftMaker Office is a suite of office programs designed as an alternative to Microsoft Office . The package includes applications for creating documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. It can also be used for sending emails and organizing tasks and appointments.
SoftMaker Office is explicitly designed to be an alternative to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint programs with support for many of the same industry-standard formats and functionalities.
About the SoftMaker Office suite
If you are looking for a cheaper alternative to Microsoft Office, SoftMaker Office is a good choice, however free alternatives like OpenOffice or LibreOffice may be better suited to your needs.
SoftMaker Office 2018 is the latest version of the office suite from the German developer SoftMaker Software. It comes in two versions: Standard and Professional.
The standard version includes a word processor (TextMaker), a spreadsheet (PlanMaker), and presentation programs (Presentations).
You also get an enhanced version of the Mozilla Thunderbird email client . The Professional suite includes everything Standard has to offer, plus four Berlitz dictionaries.
Of the applications included in the Office application suite we can find:
TextMaker is SoftMaker's version of Word, as it supports DOC and DOCX documents and provides many of the traditional styles and formatting options, such as fonts, text indents, table insertion, and the formatting brush.
PlanMaker, which is the Excel replacement, supports XLS and XLSX files and can handle large datasets in a spreadsheet environment.
Presentations is the PowerPoint presentation component of the SoftMaker suite of applications. It supports PPT and PPTX files and offers many of the same features, such as inserting graphics and audio, and slide transitions.
BasicMaker is a simple program that provides a programming environment that allows you to control VBA-compatible Windows programs such as TextMaker and PlanMaker using SoftMaker Basic scripts.
And finally, the Mozilla Thunderbird application allows you to manage your email and organize your tasks and appointments.
SoftMaker Office has many features from office suites such as Microsoft Office, LibreOffice or WordPerfect Office, and it can also be run from a USB memory stick and supports built-in reference jobs.
It has its own native formats, and can read and write Microsoft Office, OpenDocument (word processor only), RTF, and HTML file formats. You can export to PDF.
Free SoftMaker for educational environments
As part of its Nuremberg Party education initiative, SoftMaker is offering its eponymous office suite for Linux and Windows free of charge to schools and colleges. The company had already established a similar program with its previous suite.
Softmaker Office 2018 will be provided free of charge to all schools, universities, and colleges. According to the vendor, educational institutions can use the campus license for teaching and administrative purposes.
Teachers also have the right to obtain a free license for private use.
In the case of students and students who are interested in this, they also benefit from the campaign: for group orders of at least 10 students or students, they receive the package for private use for a processing fee of around € 10 per license.
The office pack generally costs a little less than 70 euros.
The package includes the TextMaker 2018 text editor , the PlanMaker 2018 spreadsheet , and the Presentations 2018 presentation software . In addition, the package comes with a customized version of the Thunderbird email client.
Those interested in obtaining this benefit of the free or reduced version of Softmaker Office 2018 can request the promotion directly on the provider's website.
You should also know that the suite earlier this year launched the support of its products for Linux, so this is a multiplatform office suite that can be used for any operating system in educational environments.