SoftMaker has been making office software for mobile devices since PDAs were cool. For years, the company’s text, spreadsheet, and presentation apps for Windows Mobile offered better support for desktop office documents and more features than pretty much anybody else’s software.
Now SoftMaker has released public beta versions of its first office apps for Android.
TextMaker is a word processing application, PlanMaker makes spreadheets, and SoftMaker Presentations is a PowerPoint-like app for viewing and creating presentations.
The company has been working on these apps for over a year. Much of the work involved retooling the user interface to make it easier to use with your fingers rather than a stylus.
One of the things that sets SoftMaker products apart from other mobile office suites is support for a range of file formats. Not only can SoftMaker Office apps open docs in a variety of formats, but it can also save files as MS Office, OpenDocument, HTML, TXT, or even Pocket Office (Windows Mobile) files.
While in beta, SoftMaker Office 2012 for Android is free to use — but the beta expires on April 30th, 2012. The company will either release a new beta at that point or offer full versions of the apps for sale.
Thank you! I really need this software and will download it to my Transformer soon.
Okay, I jumped through all the hoops and downloaded a copy of the word processor to my Transformer. It’s a bit different, but I suppose I could get used to it if I only wanted to write a book chapter or so and then send it over to Word on my laptop. However, there is no spell checker so I won’t be using it.
They may add a spell checker to it later, though. The other copies they sell have it. So, maybe this version for Android is too early.
The little I tried worked well, though.
There is a multi-language spell checker in TextMaker. Please read http://www.softmaker.com/english/tipsandroid_en.htm for a description how to set it up.
Martin Kotulla
SoftMaker Software GmbH
planmaker is, I think, a spreadsheet rather than the statement in the article above that I am questioning ….” PlanMaker makes presentations, and SoftMaker Presentations is a PowerPoint-like app for viewing and creating presentations.”
Yup… let’s call that one a mental typo. Thanks for pointing it out!