Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
Website: https://www.freeoffice.com/en/download
Price: Supposedly free, but mine says it will expire in 6 days…
Blurb: “The best free alternative to Microsoft Office“
Weighing in at only 125BMB (.deb-file), the download is quick, but the installation is painfully slow if you have a lot of themes (like me), as it seems to add updated icons to each one. The installer also tries to call home, best block it in your firewall.
Linux office suites are a mixed bag, some offer better compatibility with M$ office, while others strive to be ahead of the curve. When it comes to looks, SoftMaker FreeOffice mimics Office 2013 onwards, the best. That said, the naming does not mimic M$ office at all. In my menu I see; not just “planmaker” but FreeOffice PlanMaker, FreeOffice TextMaker and FreeOffice Presentations. This now needlessly sets me on a mission to edit the names to pull my menu back to a reasonable size. PlanMaker is their version of Excel and not Visio, just so you know. Starting any of the office components, again, it immediately tries to phone home, regardless if the network is connected or not. (And here I thought the WPS office was bad!).
I do not like the large Microshaft ribbon, but once folded away, it feels quite professional. Compatibility with Open document standards is perfect, but spellcheck is not on by default. For me, that is not a problem, but I can see some Sally at home having issues. (Oi!! What do you have against me? - Sally).
Speaking of the ribbon, you choose the icon types when you launch it for the first time. Large or small, dark or light theme as seen here:
However, as I am writing this article in TextMaker, I tried inserting images, and yes, it inherits all the bugs from Microshaft Orifice, refusing to insert the images where my cursor is, instead opting to insert them in the footer of the previous page. I had to revert to trusty LibreOffice to get the images inserted correctly, as it would not cooperate.
Also, in TextMaker, the line spacing is bigger than other Office suites on my ‘puter, meaning the pages did not line up. (Font was standard Ubuntu Mono at 12pts). The plus side to this is that there are no visual artefacts when scrolling. Saving a document in TextMaker, automatically adds grey outlines to your page, that carry over to other editors. I am not sure if that is a good or bad thing. Opening a new document with a lot of images is where you may find a slight niggle, they take a while to load in, even on an SSD. You may find yourself flipping back and forth between the pages looking for a specific image to pop into one of the blank spots.
Next, I gave Presentations the quick once-over. Immediately I was stuck trying to pattern the background.
All the background “tiles” were blank. Now I am not sure if this is because I downloaded the free version, or if it is a bug, but this is where my woes started. Only after trying ALL the options, then circling back through them, did the patterns appear. I did not expect this level of sluggishness. Trying to add a blank slide quickly with CTRL+m, which resulted in the “inset slide” pop-up to appear with layouts. The blank slide is hidden two-thirds the way through.
Again, I am not sure if this is a positive or negative, but it felt like my rhythm was interrupted. I would write that off to me being used to using LibreOffice, but even M$ office places the blank page / template first.
I wanted to add a note as to what I did to get there, and could not find it. I hate having to scratch for the things you use the most. There is a “Comments” option, under the “insert” tab, but that kept saying it could not make the note without me entering my name and surname. *Le Sigh… I did find “notes” under the “view” tab, if you were wondering (same as MS office). Instead of the presentation just sliding up and me getting to type my note below my side, it narrowed the slide, and I could not just revert, even pressing CTRL+z. The space I was offered to put the note in, was in the right pane, where the slides / outline usually is. It said “note 1”, but I could not type in it. Suddenly it all just felt foreign.
The ribbon is quite responsive and fairly easy to use once you get used to it. The tools on the ribbon are also quite useful, so don’t think that it is all bad. Choosing “transitions”, I opted for the “SoftMaker Transitions”, which netted me a back slide. Again, not ideal.
My whirlwind tour of SoftMaker Office was slowly starting to leave a bad taste in my mouth. I decided to leave it there, and we will see if the 2022 version got any better. I am trying to remember that I am used to LibreOffice, and should not compare the ease of use as my outlook may be skewed.
I was not done, as Excel is usually the most “productive” application in the M$ office suite. I would import some “.xlsx” files to see how it went. PlanMaker looked a lot like M$ excel, except for the trolley. The same trolley is in the top bar too. I get it, they want you to buy it. If it had a mail client like Outlook, I would get all my clients to at least consider it. Not having to buy Office again because M$ decided that the version you had now does not work on server any more and you need to buy another licence, to justify some crap excuse, is reason enough. (I get it, M$, software makers need to be paid, but not over and over and over again, ad nauseam, for the same thing, because, EULA).
So how does it perform in PlanMaker? Quite admirably, actually, all my macros worked, everything displayed properly.
I did not have any Pivot tables to test, (I did test the sample ones from Microsoft, and had no issues with those, but I must admit, I am positive your own will work, as even the funny stuff with recursive formulas worked for me). To put this into perspective, they run out of memory in Excel and crash M$ office when you open them, but in SoftMaker FreeOffice they don’t crash. I pulled in a 34MB excel document from a client and PlanMaker idled at 100MB of memory usage. Running a report off the data, my CPU spiked to 70%. It is an i3, comparing it to the work Dell i5, where M$ Office ran 100% CPU usage on the same report and you could do nothing but wait, I continued writing my article on Linux. This may be a Linux / Windows thing, but the report finished at the same time as Excel, which makes one wonder. I am going to go out on a limb here and say that the performance of PlanMaker is better than any other Linux Office suite, including M$ Office.
SoftMaker needs to add an email client and maybe something like Visio, and it will be a show stopper. (Or get sued out of existence by Microsoft). If they had put as much work into the presentation application as they put into PlanMaker, this release could have been the diamond in the rough. I do not use Presentation or Powerpoint anything, but it is the weakest link in the suite as it is now. Let’s hope it is fixed in the next release. For Windows, I would definitely buy this; for Linux, if you are not tied to M$ ribbon and layout, there are other options: WPS Office also did everything I wanted, without slowdowns and artifacts in the powerpoint application. OnlyOffice (Free version) does not give full functionality to the free version to test, you have to buy the paid version to test all there is. JoeOffice is alpha software, but usable.
Uninstalling Softmaker Office also took its sweet time, giving me time to make a cuppa, smoke some ham, mow the lawn, paint the boathouse, and write my 420-page novel.