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Softmaker Office 2016

Handheld PC News

Posted 9 years ago | Announcement | Richard Hawley 0 comments

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From Textmaker 2002 to Softmaker Office 2016 by Rich Hawley

It has been a long voyage from Textmaker 2002 to now...Windows CE has become just a past memory for Softmaker...yet still they make great products, even if not for Windows CE.

I just received an offer to download Softmaker Office 2016 for Windows. Being a school teacher, they gave it to me for free...which is just the right price. After using it for a while, I have no idea why I still use Microsoft Office...but I still do...probably just from habit.

The new Softmaker Office will do everything the Windows version will...at least everything that I use it for. Complicated Microsoft Word documents opened quickly and easily, even those with multipage worksheets and a total of over 500 pages. Footers, headers, footnotes, all displayed perfectly.

PlanMaker is just as good as Excel in my opinion. Multipart spreadsheets with rows of formulas worked just as they did in the Excel spreadsheet.

Presentations 2016 read my PowerPoint files and those I created with the 2015 version looked just as well when using PowerPoint.

I see that Thunderbird is now the email client that comes with Softmaker Office...which is a shame in a way, because I love the CEMail that came with the CE version of Softmaker Office 2010.

One new and interesting utility that comes with the desktop version of SO 2016 is a utility called BasicMaker 2016. It really reminds you of Visual Basic. That is you can write script files to perform many function, especially those integrated with the Softmaker suite. The scipt files cannot be compiled to a standalone executable unfortunately...that would be sweet. Instead you have to load the Basicmaker program and run the script from there.

BasicMaker does support a CLI however, so you can run a script from a DOS type prompt by typing something like "basicmaker.exe /s myscript.bas" and the program will load and execute, and then when done, exit. This at least allows you create a batch file to do everything, but it still isn't a single simple program.

If they ever come out with a compiler, it will be like the old compilers you had in the GWBasic days where you write your code, compile it, and then run the program from either a command line, or the Windows environment.

You can download SO 2016 and try it out for free for a month....something to do when you have nothing else to do. If you remember, a few years back Softmaker offered a free version of their Office 2008 for Windows. This release is far improved....
Posted on 13 September 2015 at 19:56By Richard Hawley (Rich Hawley)

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