![]() What about SoftMaker, though? If you need something as close as possible to Microsoft Office on Linux, it is worth a look, though we suggest checking with some typical documents that you work with before drawing firm conclusions on whether it really beats the competition for compatibility. The good news is that most everyday documents import and export pretty well the bad news is that if you want every little detail right, there is no substitute for using Microsoft’s suite, preferably on Windows. ![]() It is not really a level playing field there are eccentricities in the details of how Microsoft Office documents render. These experiments show that getting perfect reproduction of Office document formats on Linux is still not easy, though considering the challenges both LibreOffice and SoftMaker do a decent job. Sparklines were missing in PlanMaker too, but the Calibri font displayed OK. LibreOffice showed this as a missing font and substituted a sans-serif font that was quite ugly and oversized, and the Sparklines in the Excel spreadsheet (which show trends in a small in-cell graphic) did not display. The default Excel font is Calibri, a Microsoft font. ![]() In the TextMaker version, there is a slash character overlaying one of the club symbols. You can see these issues if you squint carefully at our illustration. TextMaker got the page break right and the card symbols displayed OK, but the character spacing went wrong next to some card symbols so that punctuation appeared on top of the symbol instead of after it. In addition, some text was chopped off in one of the table cells. ![]() In LibreOffice, the page break went awry with the heading for one column appearing at the bottom of the previous page. In Edit mode, however, the font used for card symbols did not display correctly. Word Online in Reading mode was pretty much perfect. We also took a look at Word Online on Ubuntu, using Firefox. We copied the torture-test document to an Ubuntu system and tried opening it in both LibreOffice and TextMaker. It is worth noting too that there is an interaction with the printer driver in word processor documents, so you will not necessarily get exactly the same appearance on different computers even with Word. In other words, it is a challenging compatibility test. It has card symbols, multiple tables, two columns, and if anything goes slightly wrong with the precise space occupied by the content in each cell, the document soon gets mangled. The formatting is tight as it must fit on two sides of A4. Is SoftMaker Office really better than LibreOffice for Microsoft Office formats? Your correspondent is a bridge player and there is Word document in circulation (with a million variations) that describes the intricacies of the game’s conventions. Microsoft Office compatibility: Is SoftMaker better? Options include light and dark, ribbon or dropdown menus, and a “Touch mode” for easier tablet use. It was contentious at the time, and SoftMaker maintains neutrality by giving users a choice at first startup, or later in preferences. The ribbon arrived in Office 2007, partly intended to make the numerous features more discoverable, and partly to make Microsoft Office more distinctive. The company added that it has “plans to add ODS and ODP sometime in the future”, these being the OpenDocument formats for spreadsheets and presentations.Īnother area of historic contention in office suites is whether to use dropdown menus or a Microsoft-style ribbon UI. It can store “some additional features that TextMaker has over Microsoft Word”. ![]() SoftMaker told us that “TMDX” is a slightly enhanced version of the “DOCX” format. Adding to the confusion, the press release we were sent states: “The applications included in the Office suite natively use the Microsoft file formats DOCX, XLSX and PPTX,” disagreeing with the dialogue in the product itself. OpenDocument XML is also in TextMaker but buried in preferences after installation. Users find these choices confusing since the native formats “support all the features” but it is unclear what you will miss by using the Microsoft formats, other than recipients of your documents complaining that they cannot open them. That said, when you start up SoftMaker Office it asks you to choose between Microsoft XML and its own formats TMDX, PMDX, and PRDX, which are not generally supported by other applications for import or export. ![]()
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