![]() The default Excel font is Calibri, a Microsoft font. LibreOffice vs TextMaker vs Word Online: a detail from a tricky Word document In the TextMaker version, there is a a slash character overlaying one of the club symbols. ![]() You can see these issues if you squint carefully at our illustration. TextMaker got the page break right and the card symbols displayed OK, but the character spacing went wrong next to some card symbols so that punctuation appeared on top of the symbol instead of after it. In addition, some text was chopped off in one of the table cells. In LibreOffice the page break went awry with the heading for one column appearing at the bottom of the previous page. In Edit mode, however, the font used for card symbols did not display correctly. Word Online in Reading mode was pretty much perfect. We also took a look in Word Online on Ubuntu, using Firefox. We copied the torture-test document to an Ubuntu system and tried opening it in both LibreOffice and TextMaker. It is worth noting too that there is an interaction with the printer driver in word processor documents, so you will not necessarily get exactly the same appearance on different computers even with Word. ![]() In other words, it is a challenging compatibility test. It has card symbols, multiple tables, two columns, and if anything goes slightly wrong with the precise space occupied by the content in each cell, the document soon gets mangled. The formatting is tight as it must fit on two sides of A4. Is SoftMaker Office really better than LibreOffice for Microsoft Office formats? Your correspondent is a bridge player and there is Word document in circulation (with a million variations) that describes the intricacies of the game's conventions. Microsoft Office compatibility: Is SoftMaker better? SoftMaker has perhaps a tidier user interface, including the ribbon UI which LibreOffice lacks, but is behind on some features. Unfortunately for SoftMaker, the free LibreOffice is a capable performer and developing rapidly. But Microsoft Word does not run on Linux – well, not without Wine or other trickery, so this is another option there. It is good to support alternatives to products from huge corporations like Microsoft, but why use SoftMaker Office? This is being typed in TextMaker and little things like unnecessary hyphenation and inferior font rendering are obvious. There is even "New OLE Object" in the menu, in the Windows version, complete with Windows 95 dialogue styling, one of a few occasions where the product feels dated. Not much new then, but a quick spin with the suite shows that it has all the essentials these are feature-rich products. There are tweaks to footnotes, endnotes and cross-references, new navigation features, a few new functions in PlanMaker, and a new option in Presentations to create a standalone slide show. There is a new database module for mail merge which uses SQLite "in addition to dBase databases" (yes, this does feel like going back in time). ![]() There is integration with an open-source citation management system called Zotero. What's new in SoftMaker Office 2021? Not a great deal, it seems. You can also take a look at CNET's list of the best Windows laptops.SoftMaker has options for both menu diehards and ribbon lovers If you're looking for basic versions of each of these apps, the free version should work well for you.įor more productivity coverage, check out what Microsoft 365 Basic offers customers, all of the best features in Windows 11 and how to take screenshots in Windows 10 or 11. There are still benefits to the free version, including the ability to share links to your work and collaborate in real time, similar to what the Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) productivity tools allow. They also have fewer features than the full Microsoft 365 versions. You might be saying, "Wait a minute, if I can get all of those apps for free, why pay for Microsoft 365 in the first place?" The functionality of the free apps is limited, so they only run in your web browser and you can only use them while you're actively connected to the internet. Screenshot by Alison DeNisco Rayome/CNET So what's the catch for the free version? Use the browser-based version of the Microsoft Word app for free.
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