Filed under: Software
ThinkFree Office 3 available
Late last week, the ThinkFree Corporation released ThinkFree Office 3 for the Mac. For the uninitiated, ThinkFree Office is a suite of office applications that can be used as an alternative to Microsoft's Office, and includes a word processing application (Write), a spreadsheet application (Calc) and presentation software (Show). None of these apps use proprietary file formats, meaning they play very well with Word,
Excel, and PowerPoint. In fact, my brother in law has been using ThinkFree office in a mixed Mac/Windows work environment for ages now with no trouble.Changes to version 3 include: Support for 11 languages - including right-to-left publishing (i.e. Chinese, Arabic), an option to save as files as PDF, bundled fonts (i.e. Arial, Times New Roman) and an enhanced user interface. You can download a trial copy here. A single license will run you $50US, and users of previous versions can upgrade for $30US. ThinkFree Office 3 requires Mac OS X 10.3 (Java 1.4.2 Update 2 or later) or Mac OS X 10.4 (From August 2005) running on a G4 or G5.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Jake of 8bitjoystick.com said 11:29PM on 8-29-2005
So why would someone want to use this over NeoOffice for Mac?
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William said 3:26PM on 8-29-2005
Does it crash or have memory problems?
I have MS Office for Mac and it locks up sometimes, which it shouldn't do!
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Gar said 5:03PM on 8-29-2005
Soooo... if it's 50 bucks, what is 'free' about it? It might that after you pay for ThinkFree you will be free from buying 'Word'. I wonder how this compares to OpenOffice... which is free to use/own.
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Jason Coleman said 5:49PM on 8-29-2005
Yeah, I'm not thinking $50 sounds so free. Maybe that's really cheap compared to the standard version of MacOffice, but it seems like most everyone buys the Student-Teacher edition (which works out to be $50/license, if I remember correctly). It not free to be sure, but not all that expensive, either.
Also, as a previous comment mentioned, you can download OpenOffice(http://www.openoffice.org/), which is completely free for home users. However, I might suggest getting NeoOffice (http://www.neooffice.org/), which is built on OpenOffice, but looks and feels much more like a native OS X program. You didn't buy that nice Mac to use an ugly Linux program like OpenOffice, right?
I use OpenOffice on my Linux box and it is stable and very useful. You won't run into too many things you can't do with it, in my experience.
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Matt Fitzsimmons said 9:59AM on 8-30-2005
I tried it out and it's kind of cool. The only problem I've really had is that it majorly messes up the kerning (to the point of even different letters in a word having different spacing), which makes it unuseable.
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