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Add to SafariWhen comparing SoftMaker Office/FreeOffice vs Abiword + Gnumeric + Dia (formerly GNOME Office), the Slant community recommends SoftMaker Office/FreeOffice for most people. In the question“What are the best office suites for UNIX-like systems?” SoftMaker Office/FreeOffice is ranked 7th while Abiword + Gnumeric + Dia (formerly GNOME Office) is ranked 10th. The most important reason people chose SoftMaker Office/FreeOffice is:
SoftMaker office can open doc(x), xls(x), and ppt(x) files without messing up formatting.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Great interoperability with Microsoft Office
SoftMaker office can open doc(x), xls(x), and ppt(x) files without messing up formatting.
Pro Multi-platform
Works on Windows, Mac, Linux and Android.
Pro Low on dependencies
On Linux it avoids the common widget toolkits which makes it really lightweight compared to other office suites.
Pro Configurable user interface
Includes the possibility to use Ribbons or classical Menus.
Pro EU based company
Follows the the General Data Protection Regulation of the EU.
Pro Has a free version
A free version, called SoftMaker FreeOffice, is available.
FreeOffice is a stripped down version of SoftMaker Office, with less features, templates and interface polish, but it still is feature-packed and with the same excellent import and export filters that enable opening/saving Microsoft Office formats faithfully.
Pro Free technical support
If you face any issues, you can always use the technical support by developer SoftMaker, it's free.
Pro Documentation
Even the FreeOffice version includes a Handbook in PDF.
Pro EPUB export included
You can create high-quality e-books in EPUB format easily.
Pro Integration of Zotero
Especially important for academic use: SM Office has a great working connector to Zotero for the direct insertion of citations.
Pro Free for teachers
The regular paid version is free for teachers.
Pro Great amount of advanced features
Compared to alternatives like OnlyOffice and WPS, really important advanced features especially for compatibility with Excel.
Pro Lightweight
Both AbiWord & Gnumeric are designed with low resource consumption in mind. As such they are great applications for older computers.
Pro Great import/export features
Pro Free and open-source
Pro Straight forward
'Old' style menu structure is lovely to support users.
Pro Multilingual
Over 30 languages are supported.
Pro Collaborative editing
Abiword is able to edit online collaborative documents.
Cons
Con The regular paid version is not free for students as it is for teachers
For students to use it, there needs to be a free student license for the regular (with . docx support) version.
Con Proprietary software
Although some versions/programs are free to download, they're all proprietary licenses utilizing a freeware model.
Con Free version needs registration
The free version needs to be registered with a valid email adress.
Con Installs a lot of crap and does not clean up
On Linux it installs over 40 MB of templates, images and other crap people will never need.
De-install does not clean up usr/share/freeoffice.
Con Breaks icon themes
On Linux it breaks all icon themes by modifying them.
Con No VBA support
As Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) is proprietary software used in MS Office.
Con It's not Microsoft Office and it never will be
Use SoftMaker Office only if you want basic MS Office-like features. Once you delve deeper into the software the omissions become glaringly obvious.
Con Almost abandoned
Very few updates and bug fixes.
Con Default format is only readable with Gnumeric
Gnumeric is able to read/write a lot of file formats including ODS, XLS, XLSX, but it's default .gnumeric format is only readable with Gnumeric.
Con AbiWord has a dated aesthetic
The interface hasn't had a facelift since it's inception in 1998.
Con File interchangability
You may like it or not, but this is an O365 dominated world. And at some time you will need to send somebody the result of your work digitally. Then not being able to share a compatible file format is a pain. Even if your application is great and light (which it is).
