Announcing the Public Beta of SoftMaker Office 2008 for Windows.

Now comes with a PowerPoint alternative and VBA-like macro support.

SoftMaker has announced the release of the first public beta version of SoftMaker Office 2008 for Windows, an office suite designed to be compatible with, and compete with, Microsoft Office.

This new major release of the popular office suite not only updates the word processor TextMaker and the spreadsheet PlanMaker, but also adds two brand-new applications: SoftMaker Presentations 2008, SoftMaker's alternative to Microsoft PowerPoint, and BasicMaker 2008, which adds Visual Basic-compatible scripting support to SoftMaker Office.

More after the break

Why SoftMaker Office? With Microsoft Office still commanding an overwhelming market share, this is a valid question. SoftMaker's answer is: SoftMaker Office is faster, more reliable, much more affordable, and still fully compatible with Microsoft Office.

If you are accustomed to Microsoft Office 2003, it is easier to switch to SoftMaker Office than to Microsoft's own Office 2007 with its non-standard "ribbons" user interface.

All components of SoftMaker Office 2008 read and write their Microsoft Office counterparts' file formats: TextMaker has been praised by users and press alike for its proficient Microsoft Word file format support. PlanMaker reads and writes all Excel workbooks losslessly, and SoftMaker Presentations opens and saves PowerPoint presentations without a hitch.

But SoftMaker Office 2008 defines itself not only by being "like Microsoft Office". It offers valuable additions, for example allowing the user to create PDF files across all its applications, or its OpenDocument file support in TextMaker. Other features not known from other office suites are that the whole SoftMaker suite can be installed on a USB stick and then used on any computer, or its wide support of operating systems: It is not only available for Windows, but also for Linux, for Windows CE-based Handheld PCs, and for Pocket PCs running the Windows Mobile operating system. SoftMaker Office offers the same set of features on all these platforms.

SoftMaker Presentations, one of the two completely new applications in SoftMaker Office 2008, is a capable, user-friendly presentation graphics program. Those who have used PowerPoint before will quickly find themselves at home and will soon discover many small improvements over the so-called "industry standard".

SoftMaker Presentations supports all animations and transitions known from Microsoft PowerPoint, comes with full AutoShapes and OLE support and has advanced slide management and outlining capabilities.

BasicMaker, the second new program in SoftMaker Office 2008, is a VBA-compatible macro language that makes it possible to automate common tasks in TextMaker and PlanMaker through BASIC macros.

Syntaxwise, BasicMaker is modeled after Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), and its OLE Automation object model is a subset of Microsoft Office's. Users that already have experience in macro writing with Microsoft Office, will be up to speed with SoftMaker Office macros in no time at all.

SoftMaker Office 2008 is Unicode-compatible and runs its user interface in 14 languages, including English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Dutch, Italian, Hungarian, Turkish, and Bulgarian.

SoftMaker invites all interested users to beta-test the software.

A free-of-charge 40 MByte download, the beta version can be used to explore this exciting alternative office suite. The download is available from www.softmaker.com/english/ofw08_en.htm

Versions of SoftMaker Office 2008 for Linux and Pocket PCs are already being worked on and will be released in the coming months.

For more information, go to http://www.softmaker.com

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