I recently tried Softmaker's Planmaker 2012 and Textmaker 2012 which are viable cheaper alternatives to the expensive MS-Office 2010. The Standard is $79.95 and the Professional is $99.95. They also offer a 30 day trial version to get the look and feel of it before you buy. Below are my screenshots and a link to the developer's website.
SoftMaker Office 2012. Your new office suite.
Choose SoftMaker Office 2012 as your office suite, and you will get the job done in less time and with better results. SoftMaker Office is reliable, powerful, fast, and easy to use.Compatible with Microsoft Office 2010, 2007, 2003, and more.
To be useful in the real world, an office suite needs to be compatible with Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents.SoftMaker Office 2012 fills this requirement competently: It not only works seamlessly with the old Microsoft Office formats DOC, XLS, and PPT, but also faithfully reads and writes files in the new DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX formats that have been introduced with Microsoft Office 2007 and 2010.
You will not find any other office suite that renders documents in all these Microsoft Office formats as faithfully as SoftMaker Office 2012.
Planmaker 2012
Every day there's some reckoning to do: whether in balancing a checkbook, drafting a budget, doing a sales forecast, creating a comprehensive financial model, or comparing mortgage offers.
PlanMaker 2012 handles such tasks reliably and with ease. More than 330 built-in functions are available to perform date and time, mathematical, statistical and financial calculations and to do data analysis.
The AutoFilter and Special filter help you manage huge data sets. Data grouping, like a word processor's outline view, hides the details and lets you see the big picture.
"What if" questions can be answered by using the scenario manager, which lets you test the effects that various values will have on the results of your calculations.
If a mistake is hiding somewhere in your calculations, syntax highlighting and the formula auditing wizard help you quickly find the place where things went wrong.
PlanMaker 2012 reads and writes Excel worksheets seamlessly, in both XLS and XLSX formats, ensuring trouble-free data exchange with all versions of Excel from 5.0 to 2010.
Textmaker 2012
Not only for your personal correspondence...
You write letters or short notes every day. You're always in a hurry; everything needs to be ready now. For that, you need a word processor that takes the labour out of routine tasks:
- When you write a letter with TextMaker, you don't have to type in the recipient's address by hand. TextMaker simply inserts it from its built-in address book.
- TextMaker checks your spelling while you are typing, marking typos with a red underline. This is not limited to English: TextMaker supports spell checking in 20 languages, even Russian and Arabic.
- Do you need an envelope for your letter? TextMaker comes with an envelope wizard that frees you from having to measure and position the address and sender fields.
- Would you rather send your letter by e-mail? Not a problem either. TextMaker creates a PDF file and offers to send it by e-mail.
