SoftMaker FreeOffice is a full-featured Office alternative to the expensive Microsoft Office suite. Now SoftMaker has readied a new version: FreeOffice 2016 for Windows and Linux (arriving on the 18th April) that not only provides a large number of new functions, but also enhances compatibility with Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
Office applications are indispensable tools, both for home use and in everyday business. Users who don’t feel like spending money for the “top dog”, Microsoft Office, can choose among several free alternatives. However, they often harbour problems opening the Excel, Word and PowerPoint file formats – sometimes the layout and formatting get lost, on other occasions files cannot even be opened.
The positive exception to this rule is FreeOffice from European software developer SoftMaker. This office suite is the free edition of SoftMaker Office, which has been frequently praised for its compatibility with Microsoft Office. FreeOffice was first released four years ago and has found several million users worldwide.
Out with the old, in with the new:
SoftMaker has now completely overhauled the package and added important new features. The result is FreeOffice 2016 for Windows and Linux, which can be downloaded from April 18th via www.freeoffice.com free of charge.
FreeOffice 2016 is based on SoftMaker’s current commercial offer, SoftMaker Office 2016, thus profiting from the many improvements which SoftMaker has made to the commercial version. For example, it renders graphics even faster than its predecessor, by using several CPU cores. Additionally, it is compatible with Windows XP to Windows 10 as well as all current Linux distributions and supports both touchscreens and 4K monitors.
FreeOffice 2016 has been improved in many other ways, too:
FreeOffice was already viewed by many as the reference for seamless processing of Microsoft Office documents. The new version, FreeOffice 2016, uses revised file filters, whose quality has improved even further. The result: FreeOffice 2016 opens Word documents in DOC and DOCX formats, XLS and XLSX format Excel worksheets and PowerPoint presentations in PPT and PPTX formats loss-free. No other free Office suite achieves such a high level of interoperability.
New EPUB export and improved PDF export: High-quality PDF files can also be created directly from all FreeOffice applications, now also with PDF tags, comments, tracked changes and bookmarks.
A new arrival in TextMaker is EPUB export: The word processor turns documents into E-books at the flick of a key.
Pivot tables and conditional formatting just like in Excel 2016: The new PlanMaker provides pivot tables for sophisticated data analysis at eye-level with Microsoft Excel. Conditional formatting now also works as in Excel 2016 – including colour bars, marking the highest and lowest values as well as new icons for value trends.
Huge worksheets with up to one million rows are now offered by PlanMaker as are additional mathematical functions and new chart types.
Improved tables in Presentations: The old version of Presentations collated the tables from AutoShapes. This changes with FreeOffice 2016 – Presentations now supports genuine tables, like those that can be found in TextMaker or modern versions of PowerPoint.
With animations and slide transitions based on DirectX, the user is provided with a huge variety of spectacular effects that make slide shows genuine “eye-catchers”.
Martin Kotulla, SoftMaker’s Managing Director: “If you’re looking for a free, highly performant Office suite which offers top compatibility, you cannot look past the new FreeOffice 2016. We are convinced that FreeOffice 2016 is the best free Office suite, and we cordially invite everybody to download it on April 18. FreeOffice 2016 is licensed for home and business use alike”.
Summary:
• FreeOffice 2016 for Windows and Linux is available as a free download.
• A full Office suite, which can be used free by businesses and at home alike.
• The word processor TextMaker opens DOC and DOCX files seamlessly and glistens with power-user features such as Word-compatible change tracking as well as PDF and EPUB export.
• The spreadsheet program PlanMaker opens XLS and XLSX files true to the original, works with huge worksheets of up to one million rows and offers pivot tables at eye-level with Excel.
• The presentation software Presentations opens PPT and PPTX files precisely as PowerPoint does and supports impressive animations and slide transitions using DirectX graphics acceleration.