The first impression of SoftMaker Office 2010 beta for Linux

Recently, a letter from SoftMaker (Germany) was sent to the mailbox, which reported good news: a free beta version of the SoftMaker Office 2010 office suite for Linux is available .
About half a year ago I tried the previous version of this package (Office 2008), which by the way was quite recently distributed free of charge (thanks to al1k for the hint), and decided to find out what has changed since that time.
I will compare the programs from the SoftMaker Office 2010 package with the most common office suite for Linux - OpenOffice.org.
Under the cut a large number of screenshots and personal impressions.


SoftMaker Office 2010 includes a text editor - TextMaker, a spreadsheet editor - PlanMaker, and a presentation program - Presentations.
')

General impressions

After launch, a non-native appearance immediately catches the eye. The program looks like something foreign. Apparently, Wine is compiled into the Linux version, which defines the characteristic appearance of fonts, menus and dialog boxes.
In the settings, you can change the design to Windows 95, Windows XP, Windows 7 and even Windows Mobile (I do not use Wine, maybe in it you can customize any program).

Font smoothing

The fonts in the menu are not smoothed, very similar to Windows fonts. The fonts in the documents are smoothed, but not good enough. The program does not use subpixel anti-aliasing, due to which the text seems blurry. In OpenOffice, the fonts are smoothed by the means of the system, due to which they look much better.

Program interface

All program dialogs and message boxes resemble the standard Windows dialogs (which is not Vista).



The interface of all programs in the package largely repeats that of Microsoft Office XP / 2003. The icons are simple and clear in the style of MS Office 97/2000. The icons do not use pseudo-3D effects, which I personally like.
Work with several documents is organized in the form of a strange combination of tabs and a multi-window interface. Before I had to deal with this type of interface.

Launch speed

Package programs start in 2 to 3 seconds, about the same time on my machine the first time OpenOffice starts. Restarting programs takes the same amount of time (there is no quick launch function).

Memory consumption

When opening large documents, TextMaker consumes about 200 MB, OpenOffice consumes about the same. It should be noted that the programs from the SoftMaker Office package are launched in separate processes (meaning TextMaker, PlanMaker and Presentations), and OpenOffice uses a single process with shared memory for all programs, thus when working with a large number of different documents, the total memory consumption of OpenOffice will be lower (maybe here I am confusing something, correct me if I'm wrong).

TextMaker

The organization of menu items and icons are similar to the corresponding ones in Microsoft Word 97 - 2003. I did not notice any special differences in the set of functions compared to other office suites. To underline words with errors, you must enable the corresponding item in the settings. The spellchecking module does not know about the letter E (all words with “e” underscore as errors), according to my observations, the set of words in the dictionary is not very rich - when scrolling through large documents, the number of underlined words is clearly more than in OpenOffice (in particular, there are no prepositions).

Opening MS Office Documents

Perhaps the most important indicator of the quality of office suites for Linux is usually the quality of opening and displaying Microsoft Office documents. I opened various files containing drawings, formulas and OLE objects. The speed of opening complex documents in TextMaker roughly coincides with the speed of OpenOffice.



TextMaker poorly displays OLE objects and does not allow them to be edited (even Excel graphics and Word graphics are inserted as an object). On the place of many drawings are displayed empty rectangles. On the other hand, with the help of TextMaker I managed to open the .docx file, which completely hung OpenOffice. But in general, we can conclude that support for Microsoft formats is implemented in TextMaker worse than in OpenOffice.



A separate unpleasant moment was the absence of formulas for the Linux editor. Here is a quote from the official manual (there is no Russian-language documentation for the program):
Note: The SoftMaker Equation Editor is available only for Windows and is not
included in all versions of TextMaker.

Work with styles

Compared to a convenient and well-thought-out style system in OpenOffice.org Writer, only a few header styles are available in TextMaker by default. Automatic creation of a table of contents is in its infancy.

PlanMaker

The set of functions is standard for programs of this type. Compared to OpenOffice Calc, I noticed several shortcomings, including the lack of a search function and
translation of function names into Russian (it always annoyed me in Excel).
The program slows down noticeably when working with large, multipage tables, although it may be fixed in the final release.

The developers site has a comparison of the quality of compatibility between PlanMaker and OpenOffice with the Microsoft format, which shows the advantages of PlanMaker when working with diagrams.

Presentations

About this program is nothing special to say. The set of functions is standard, did not notice any special errors. The quality of opening documents is about the same as in TextMaker.

Advantages:

+ The location of menu items is similar to that in Microsoft Office (there’s almost no need to relearn);
+ maybe open an MS Office document that is not amenable to OpenOffice;
+ better support for MS Office charts.

Disadvantages:

- price: $ 79;
- non-native appearance and non-standard dialog boxes;
- there is no formula editor (in the version for Linux);
- poor support for OLE objects in documents;
- documentation in English;

findings

Currently, SoftMaker Office 2010 does not have significant advantages over OpenOffice.org, although it may be useful for opening Word documents that are not open in Writer. It is possible that some errors will be fixed by the release date, but in general, a noticeable breakthrough is not expected.

The closest competitor is Microsoft Office Home and Student, which runs under Wine, is cheaper, works faster, and perfectly perceives the most popular office document format.

UPD: Thanks for the karma, transferred to "Linux for all."
UPD2: Perezalil pictures.