SoftMaker Office 2008 Review--Add a Real Mobile Office Suite to Your Handheld!

Many a Windows Mobile power user (including me) will insist all kinds of wild stuff about how you can replace your laptop with the built-in programs in Windows Mobile. The sad truth is, well, NOT! For one, the fancy formatting in your desktop documents may not translate well to your device when opened in the built-in pocket office apps. You need something with seriously more power and features on the device-side. SoftMaker has the answer with it's most excellent Office suite. Oh, and by the way, it's cheaper than the MS products, and compatible with several MS formats. It comes very close to letting you leave your laptop at work forever.

 Installation

SoftMaker has several flavors of their office suite software available, including versions for Linux, Windows CE, Pocket PC, and Windows desktop. The software can be downloaded here (30 day trial), and they even have student pricing! Download and install the trial like any Pocket PC application. Use the Active Sync install method, which means cradling your device, and running the installer on your desktop. If you buy the product, you can register it with your serial number during the install process. Upgraders get special pricing.

 TextMaker

Textmaker is the most robust doc editing program I've used on WM, but not the easiest to master. I will not go into every feature, but will hit the important points, like generating and updating a table of contents, adding document bookmarks, headings, tables and of course, pictures. In order to test these features, I used TextMaker to write this review on both my handheld and desktop computers. Okay, I will be frank about the desktop application. Those users who have used older document editors or even some of the open source tools out there may not mind the less automated formatting options, but MS flunkies will probably not be comfortable with it.Some aspects are not quite as turn-key as they are in MS Word. I spent a considerable amount of time tweaking headings and such. The usual simple bullet lists and numbering schemes are there for your paragraphs, but “whole” document customization and template features are not quite as mature as the desktop versions of MS Office. However, the Mobile version far outstrips other mobile document editors.

 Using Textmaker

Image Toolbar...

Textmaker does a good job of balancing the user interface, and providing a ton of features. The buttons across the bottom expand the most common document editing tasks, but toolbars can be customized and features added as desired. To access any document feature, simply select the menu icon in the far left corner, which will launch the nested menus.

Adding a picture is pretty simple, for instance by selecting the object menu--the 2nd selector arrow button in the bottom left corner--and then selecting the picture from your files, the image will be added to your document. The image can then be anchored to your specifications. Those used to a more plug-n-play application like Word may not appreciate the lack of drag-n-drop simplicity. There is no “Insert Picture”, but selecting object mode (note the toolbar on top above) is used instead to select pictures from your files to add to your docs, or new free-form drawings, forms, and text fields.

Select a Picture to insert...

Table Editing Toolbar...

Tables can similarly be inserted and formatted. Cell sizes can be quickly adjusted by selecting the edges and dragging with a stylus, but it’s not always reliable to grab the small dividers. Opening the properties and manually setting these options is actually quicker in many cases. Additional columns/rows can be added or removed, and similar functions are available via the table buttons that will appear when editing via the table menu.

Final Document Formatting

At the end of the review, I generated a Table of Contents, and added page headings as well as a Document Title. The application really does cover most of the desktop features one would expect for basic doc publishing, and you can save in a variety of formats including mobile, MS Office, OpenDocument, RTF, and HTML among others. There are a ton more useful features--including a Thesaurus--that I simply didn’t have time to cover. TextMaker is great for device-side editing when you require more than just simple Mobile Word features.

The finished doc...(view from desktop)

 PlanMaker

PlanMaker is the SoftMaker analog to MS Excel. The anemic mobile Excel product does not come close to this excellent replacement. The interface is very simlar in layout to TextMaker, so if you get used to one, the other is easy to figure out. A few functions of course differ, as you would expect, since it’s tailored for creating and editing spreadsheets. Note in the above image that I have cell text actually rotated 90 degrees, which is not possible in mobile Excel. In PlanMaker, not only can you save files in .xls formats, but also can export them as PDF documents (same for TextMaker). I can apply conditional formats to cells (see below), like color and shading based on certain value thresholds. The interface actually pretty closely resembles the real desktop Excel application. You can insert new worksheet tabs, and edit or reorder exiting tabs.

Conditional Cell formats...

Insert New sheets..

 Worksheet Actions

You can copy/paste cells (with formats and formula targets preserved) between sheets, and also into TextMaker (as tables). PlanMaker also fully supports 3-D chart and and graphing functions (which can be copy/pasted into your Presentations). I don’t want to spend too much time going over simple spreadsheet features like entering values or formulas, but suffice to say it’s very similar to Excel in this regard. Typing an “=“ in a cell will start the formula mode and after entering the desired computation (SUM in this case), will allow you to select other cells as a target (or slide a range) by tapping with the stylus. For instance, enter =SUM (see below) in a cell, and you can then select the range of cells you would like to total the values for. PlanMaker will display a little format hint as you type in formulae much like Excel does, and formula can be linked between multiple sheets.

Entering Formulae...

Copy/Paste cells into your docs and slideshows...

Graphing and Chart Features...

  Presentations

So, you do all this work on your new project. You document your solution, and create supporting studies and spreadsheets to back up your proposal, and you're headed to the big conference. You need to boil it all down and send a brief to the bigwigs before the next morning. Here’s the problem...You get stranded in your car in a blizzard! You have your WM device, and some Power bars. You could call for help, but you have a deadline, and then you realize--SoftMaker Office also includes a Presentations editor. Better break out the emergnecy blanket and get cracking! The work will warm your fingers anyway. As you can see from the above screenshot, the Presentation app is so much like a mini-powerpoint, it’s scary. I simply cut/pasted my spreadsheet graph right into the slide above. You can easily add titles, and bullet lists, even animations. All the capability is in there. I mean you seriously could put something together with this tool, though I’m a little skeptical how many people want to use their mobile for slide briefings, but you just never know. It might not quite compete with the fancier briefings I’ve seen done in a full version of powerpoint, but it could get you through a basic slide briefing. You could set up the simple format, titles and bullets of the slides here, and then transfer the file to your desktop for more advanced editing when you get back to the office, for example.

 The SoftMaker Experience

Seriously, these tools are truly amazing when you consider they are running on a limited mobile platform. Many of the features are nearly as robust and mature as Microsoft’s desktop suite. However, that does not mean I didn’t encounter issues, or have a few gripes. The question is whether that SoftMaker Office could in reality “replace” the MS suite. SoftMaker also has a desktop suite, which I have exclusively used at home for some time (2006 version). I like it and recommend it for casual document editing. In fact, I don’t even bother to install MS Office. SoftMaker desktop is closer to the OpenOffice apps in look-n-feel, in my opinion, than to MS. A lot of features that have been around in Word are still lacking in these apps. For instance, in MS Word, I can simply drag pix right into my document to an anchor point, where they will be displayed--no fuss no muss. TextMaker requires you to go through the object editor to insert pix. If you drag or copy, it links it as an object, instead of simply displaying it. Word also makes it easier to format your document, and includes more automated and intuitive features. The spelling and grammer works better, etc. I don’t have a problem with these little idiosyncrasies, since I also use Linux and Solaris and am used to them. A new user, though, may not have the patience to deal with it, and would look elsewhere. I strongly suggest that you download these apps and try them out for awhile. If you want to bring docs home and edit them, I think the mobile and desktop applications will work well in most cases. If you want to exclusively run SoftMaker at your business and force your workers to use it, I would make sure they get good training (esp. if they are used to MS Office) and support. You would also want to make sure that your corporation or customers don’t have requirements for MS compatible reports, metadata or embedded objects that rely solely on proprietary MS-formatted data. The MS server and enterprise products are infamous for causing these kinds of problems--I.E. Your spreadsheet is published to the corporate Sharepoint portal, and an index is linked to it from somewhere using MS proprietary XML tags. I didn’t test this, and am just speculating, but that’s usually the nature of the problems you will have when products are not inter-operable in the enterprise. These are some of the reasons I might be hesitant to say that SoftMaker could actually replace MS in the workplace (same reasons other editors haven’t done it yet). Could you or your your kids use SoftMaker on a home computer, say for school-work or even to run a small business. I would say absolutely, yes. Will you be impressed at what you can do with the mobile applications on your Windows Mobile phone or PDA? Absolutely! Could you really use it to do a powerpoint brief while stranded in a snow-storm? Why not!

You can download a free 30-day trial of SoftMaker Office 2008 for your Windows Mobile device here. Magazine VIP members get a 15% discount at our software store by going to our vip site...