Thinkfree Office 2.2

This office suite is happy to run on Windows, Linux, Apple Macintosh Classic and OSX operating systems.

The newcomer to our annual office suite round-up is Thinkfree Office 2.2. You can buy this on CD, or save money by downloading it from the US website and paying by credit card. You can also download a 30-day trial.

Version 2.2 had a total folder size of 36MB, and you'll need about the same again if you don't have the (free) Java runtime environment installed.

Thinkfree is unusual in several respects. It is written in Java, and as well as running under Windows 98 or later, it is also at home with Linux, Apple Macintosh Classic and OSX operating systems.

The Thinkfree Office toolbar, although not as extravagantly featured as Lotus Smartcenter, provides access to all the components, as well as the global options for the suite.

One cosmopolitan touch is that you have a choice of interface languages should you care to try your hand at German, Spanish, French or Italian. Portuguese and Icelandic were also on the language menu, but did not appear to be implemented in the menus.

The language choice included US and UK varieties of English, which rectified an annoyance in version 2.0 where all file dates appeared in US month-day-year format.

The components consist of Write, Calc and Show covering the word processing, spreadsheet and presentation slots, and Thinkfree Folders, which is an Explorer-like file manager. There are also standalone viewers for Write, Calc and Show files, as well as an image file viewer that you need to preview pictures in Thinkfree Folders.

Cyberdrive option
An unusual extra is the Cyberdrive. Once you've registered Thinkfree, you get 20MB of online storage space. The first year's rent is included in the price of the software, and you also get a year's access to updates and free email technical support.

After that you pay for the storage and support, but the licence for the Thinkfree suite is permanent. You can also pay to increase the size of your Cyberdrive.

Write doesn't rock any boats in terms of menus and toolbars: it is pretty much the same as Microsoft Word.

Although Write opens and saves in the Microsoft Word doc format as well as its native wrf, this has its limitations. It makes a poor job of importing things such as custom bulleted lists, Wordart, drop capitals and drawing objects created in Word, although it is Unicode-compatible and will display symbols and letters from outside the Ansi character set.

Inevitably there's a lot you don't get: there are no drawing tools, no macro language and you can't customise the toolbars and menus. There is no grammar checker, although, given the track record of grammar checkers in other suites, few people will miss it. There are no fields, apart from dates and form fill-ins. Nor do you get any 'as you type' highlighting of spelling mistakes, but again, many people find this a distraction.

There is, however, an Autocorrect facility that will correct common mistakes. You can add your own words to the list and, if you need multilingual capabilities, there is a choice of nine spelling languages.

The table editor is good, sports its own toolbar and can split and merge cells, and there is a substantial clipart collection. This is packed into zip files, according to category and, unlike Windows, Write 'sees' thumbnail previews inside the zips.

Write can even do some tricks that Word can't, such as displaying animated gifs in documents, and it does have that essential tool for writers - a word counter.

HTML editor
Write scores well in HTML editing, with support for framesets and cascading stylesheets.

If you click on the 'View Source' button then a separate text editor will open - you can edit the code and there's a find and replace facility. There are also tools to create image maps, so that a graphic can have several 'hot zones', each of which has a different hyperlink.

We did find Write a bit buggy. We had problems with headers and page numbers overlapping and, sometimes, when several documents were open, the focus would oscillate rapidly between two windows until we closed one down.

Calc, once again, bears an uncanny resemblance to Excel circa Office 2000 and, like Excel, offers multiple tabbed worksheets each capable of holding 256 columns and 65,536 rows.

As with Write, it is Microsoft-compatible but this is not 100 per cent accurate, as there are graphic and functional features from Excel that are unsupported, such as conditional formatting and pivot tables. For many users, these limitations won't be important.

There are over 300 functions available, ranging from financial, through statistical, to engineering, and there are 40 chart types

You get all the usual comforts we have come to expect from a spreadsheet. You can edit formulae and values either in the toolbar or directly in a cell; you can automatically fill rows or columns with a series, such as dates and numbers; you can add comments to cells that will pop up when the cell is selected, and there's a smart autosum button that will guess the range you want to total.

Again, there were a few bugs - when we created a chart as a new sheet, we weren't able to resize it: handles appeared but could not be grabbed. Neither could we scroll a chart in a new sheet, though we could zoom in and out of it, and charts created on an existing worksheet behaved normally.

You can have multiple files open - just as you can with Write - but unlike Write, there is no Window menu, so you'll have to rely on the Windows Taskbar to switch between files.

Show time
It will come as no surprise that the final member of the suite, Show, bears a striking resemblance to Powerpoint, except that you don't get the latter's very useful split display showing thumbnails, current slide and speaker notes.

In fact there is no provision for speaker notes at all, and you need to use the scrollbar buttons to navigate between slides.

There is also far less wizardry: when you create a new presentation, you get a choice of six slide layouts, and that's it. You can customise these and, unlike the other components in Thinkfree, you have a set of drawing tools very similar to those in Microsoft Office.

Once again, the Windows menu is conspicuous by its absence, and compatibility is less than perfect: we had problems opening Powerpoint files in Show.

Digging further into the Format menu reveals a set of design templates in Powerpoint .pot format, but apparently there is no way to preview these - you have to take .pot luck.

However, they do have a professionally designed look, and it's simple to try each one. You also get custom animations and transitions, so you can make your audience dizzy watching text and graphics fly, spiral or shimmer into place.

Despite the good set of flowchart and connector symbols we couldn't find an easy way of creating bar charts and other graphs: all the other presentation creators have a mini-spreadsheet tool for this.

Performance was crisp, but we were alarmed to see the memory consumption in Windows XP - with one document open in each of the three applications, the Java environment took up twice the memory of Word, Excel and Powerpoint combined.

But if you don't want to be tied to Windows, this is worth a try.

Contact: Thinkfree
www.thinkfree.com

System requirements:

• Windows 98 or later
• Pentium 266
• 64MB Ram
• 25MB disk space

Price details:
RRP CD version £49.99 (£42.54 ex VAT)
Download version $49.95 (approx £27)

Previous review

Back to office suites group test