What really advantajes offer softmaker over ms office

[aktiff26]

I have a 2016 licence and now i am catching the money to have 2018 one but i really like to know what adantajes offer softmaker office, i dont want to discuss about "compatibility" i know are compatible. I really want to know what advantajes offer me as a wirter and researcher in social sicence. I want to know advantajes of texmaker in particular

[Jossi]

Basically, this is a matter of personal preference, so everybody will have his or her own reasons.
Reasons why I prefer SoftMaker Office over MS Office are:
- The programs have a very clear and logical UI: I find every function quickly, whereas in MS Office I'm always searching for something I cannot find.
- I am not forced to use those abominable ribbons (but I could if I would).
- Some functions are much better solved and easier to use than in MS Office, e. g. the handling of images.
- The programs start and run fast, even on older hardware.
- Support is free of charge for an unlimited time and is responsive to bug reports and feature requests.
- There is no subscription scheme, I pay once (and much less than for MS Office).
- I love to support a small independent company that keeps close to its customers.

[aktiff26]

I really like the interfaz, i see the spellchecker are litle bad, but maybe whith the use it adapts to my wirting mode, i like the tabbed windows mode. Now i want to know if i can add plugins or it can store refernces to cite whith APA, and what anoher advantajes. I have my free 2016 bur i am thinking to move to 2018. Plase i am not in a ms lover i am triying to use another alternaive more reliable and i put my eye on softmaker

[sven-l]

I really like the interfaz, i see the spellchecker are litle bad, but maybe whith the use it adapts to my wirting mode, i like the tabbed windows mode. Now i want to know if i can add plugins or it can store refernces to cite whith APA, and what anoher advantajes.

You can use our own dictionaries for spell checking, and the Hunspell dictionaries. Add-ons are currently not available.

[Freddie]

I have a 2016 licence and now i am catching the money to have 2018 one but i really like to know what adantajes offer softmaker office, i dont want to discuss about "compatibility" i know are compatible. I really want to know what advantajes offer me as a wirter and researcher in social sicence. I want to know advantajes of texmaker in particular

I am an author and have written several books using TextMaker. I find it more reliable than MS Word, especially with regard to sections and chapters which Word has never managed to get right, always mangling the headers and footers, while TextMaker manages perfectly. I hope that the 2018 version proves as reliable.

[jimjutte]

I would echo the above comments, especially the comments related to cost and usability. Why on earth would I rent something like an office suite that I MUST have on a daily basis. I also don't like the idea that on a regular basis a company can reach over to my bank account or my visa card. Several large firms have been hacked and while I admit, I am risking exposure every time I use the credit card, if I use less, I reduce that risk. Further, most companies, once payments have gone through, drop the credit card information, again reducing your risk of exposure.

Aside from reducing my risk exposure this company reacts to both problems and requests. The shape of the product has been made based on customer feedback, the support (again, I am biased here) is made both by companies and volunteers from different backgrounds who believe in the product and the people who run the company.

Respectfully, MS is too big to even fathom that for me. Not that a large company can't do this... I just haven't seen it the way I have here.

Since you only asked about MS, I won't refer to additional firms.

Hope that helps.

[victorlage]

Much lighter than MS Office

Doesn´t force a new set of menus and useless "New" features, incl. the need of re-learning the interface

Doesn´t try to "bend" the user into the "new" ideas the creators of the software have of usability (such as the folder where I "should" best save my files, the format I "should" save my files, etc)

Can be deployed on a flash drive

Compatible with MS formats

Offers its own set of formats for flexibility

Exports to PDF and EPUB

Has a set of integrated dictionaries: good for reading and translations

Presents a set of reasonable proofing tools, though not as extensive as MS word

Compatible also to open Office formats

In short: more than enough for general use, flexible and reasonably well priced

Though not a 100% substitute for MS Word and LibreOffice (that depends on whom you share documents with, fits as a very good option

Sorry, no version for Mac as yet, but that seems to be on its way

[bugman]

victorlage did a great job listing the numerous advantages of SM Office.
I want to stress the price difference, for two products that both function well. (I think SM office works better because it is faster)

as of 2019, note that MS Office costs $150 for the Home and Student version, for ONE PC !!!
compared to $39.99 for my Softmaker Office upgrade, for FIVE PCs -- wow it's a no-brainer.
Softmaker will always offer you a reduced UPGRADE price - Microsoft WON'T.

I've used Softmaker office since 2002. Since then it has continued to get better and better, with even more reliability working with .doc and .xls files (the two main types I use). I get to use all the same keyboard shortcuts I have used in MS word since 1996. I get to destroy the ribbon.

No way I'm going to pay a subscription to microsoft to be held ransom yearly, and no way I'm going to pay those kind of prices (I have 5 children, total 7 people in household - should I really pay $1050 to licence each person just to use MS Word?

Can't recommend SM Office highly enough. Great product and great support.

[johnbear]

Top Reasons for using SoftMaker over MS Office - for me - are:
1. Tabbed windows (rather than opening a whole new window for each document)
2. REAL outline processing capability! Outline processors are great thinking/writing tools - built into the WP is heaven for me.
3. Create and Export PDF Form documents (but won't edit PDF docs after creation - yet). I use PDFs a LOT.
4. SM menu system and options are more intuitive and usable for me personally.
5. SM comes with rather complete and well written PDF User guides - most other Office products suck in comparison.
6. Reasonably good compatibility with MS Office - so far. Found some minor issues in SM Presentations.

Note that I have been using WPS Office for years (lifetime subscription), rather that MS Office, but recently WPS has "forced" several inconveniences (related to using their cloud storage, etc.) on its users that caused me to look for other options.

[seasidepb]

I use both, intially because I needed to be absolutely sure that clients could read my docx files faithfully, though these days the compatibility seems to be so good it might be unnecessary. I disagree about the value points above - the personal edition of MS Office costs £59 per year in the UK. For that you also get Outlook, Publisher and Access as well as the core office apps, and critically a 1tb of cloud storage. The integration between desktop and Android is also impressive. In the past I've also resisted the notion of a subscription but there's actually a real service element these days, and I think overall it's a fair price for use on multiple machines. If you have multiple users the £79 option is even better value.
Having said all that certainly I prefer Textmaker over Word. Word has two advantages - it's "intellisense" is better than Smart Text and its font handling/rendering is just a little bit slicker (sadly and for some reason the font rendering in LibreOffice remains abysmal). But this aside, successive versions of Word have made basic functions like file operations, print, style management and so on ridiculously complicated - all these things remain streamlined and intuitive in Textmaker. I also move frequently between my main computer and a Surface Go when travelling, using OneDrive to handle my working documents. Unforgiveably Word gets confused and intrusive when you're working offline (which happens quite a lot when you're on the move). Textmaker just seems to handle the local version of the file without bother and syncs up everything when you're back online. It's particularly stupid that Word should have this problem, because OneDrive handles any conflicting file versions quite neatly itself.
I also love the way you can configure Textmaker's UI. This used to be possibe in Word but for reasons best known to themselves it's now really restrictive, and of the few colour palettes they offer only one is comfortably usable (dark grey). I use the dark theme in Textmaker, with the ribbon on autohide. the quick access menu customised and visible, and a custom colour background behind the document. It just works better than Word.
A final comment about email - I see no value in Thunderbird. It's freely available anyway, its UI is a dog's dinner and SMO's icons don't really alter that. Outlook is ok and I use it some of the time but I've been through all the alternatives and emClient seems to be the best for serious use, beating Outlook with its gmail integration and unified inbox. It used to be part of SMO's Pro offering, though I had a licence anyway. I think there are so many options for email and different solutions for different kinds of use that I wonder whether it would be better to add some other app to a pro bundle - perhaps a mindmapping app like MindMaple which could do with a boost and a UI refresh.

[josefcunha]

It seems to me is not about cost, MS Office in this rent + services mode is prety cheap for INDIVIDUALS, for companies, SoftMaker could represent a lot of savings, it is a commercial, supported product, it does not look like incomplete product as sometimes open source alternatives does.

[Acce1937]

thanks for sharing your post,,,

[Utomo]

Maybe we also need to discuss what make people hold or not buy softmaker office?
Hopefully softmaker team can solve it and make it better