We haven’t talked about SoftMaker Office for Android in this blog for quite a bit of time.  It’s high time to bring you up-to-date again!

We have been busy working on SoftMaker Office in the last few months. Thanks to the participation of many volunteers in our internal beta test, we were able to quash many bugs, and we could also find out which features our users would like to see in SoftMaker Office.

This made us add small improvements, such as the ability to use Ctrl-C, Ctrl+X, and Ctrl+V for clipboard operations on Android devices with hardware keyboards.

But we also added major things, such as a multi-language spell-checker that puts red lines under mis-typed words. As far as I know, SoftMaker Office is the first Android office suite that offers to spell-check documents.

SoftMaker Office for Android also lets you access files stored on Dropbox directly from the application. We are working on integrating Evernote, too.

I have already talked in the past about the features that make SoftMaker Office the most powerful Android office suite – such as tables, PDF export, a full implementation of tracked changes, comments like in Microsoft Word, image support in many different file formats, exact rendering of all Excel charts, a huge number of calculation functions in PlanMaker, and the ability of SoftMaker Presentations to show all animations and transitions of Microsoft PowerPoint.

But the most important thing: all three programs read and write the classic and the current document formats of Microsoft Office 97 up to 2010 seamlessly:

• TextMaker reads and writes DOC and DOCX files,
• PlanMaker reads and writes XLS and XLSX files,
• and SoftMaker Presentations reads and writes PPT, PPS, PPTX, and PPSX files.

No other mobile office suites comes close in rendering all these file formats in such precision.

American trade journalist Tam Hanna wrote an extensive review of Android office suites for the German Android User magazine (it’s in the April 2012 issue). SoftMaker Office, though still in beta, was given a 5-star rating. In comparison, Documents to Go, MobiSystems OfficeSuite, Polaris Office, and ThinkFree all received lower grades.

QuickOffice received an exceptionally bad write-up from Mr Hanna: “American software publisher QuickOffice’s namesake office suite was a wholesale disappointment. The relatively pricey product runs stably, but renders documents mediocrely and fails with complex elements in documents.”

• • •

We will soon complete the internal beta test. Immediately after, the public beta of SoftMaker Office for Android will start. I recommend to watch our web site or our newsletter for the announcement.

It’s not only the big things that make a new version easier to use. Many small things taken together can bring a significant step forward in ease of use, too. And SoftMaker Office 2012 adds many small improvements.

So, let the parade begin…

All applications in SoftMaker Office:

• Hide fonts: Most Windows PCs have literally hundreds of fonts installed that one either does not need at all (applications installed them without asking) or are only used in specific applications, such as graphics programs. SoftMaker Office 2012 now lets you hide those fonts from its font lists that you don’t want to see when working on office documents.
• Automatic update: From now on, you no longer have to search for service packs manually. Instead, SoftMaker Office now automatically checks in user-defined intervals if a service pack is available.
• New AutoShapes: SoftMaker Office 2012 supports all those AutoShapes that Microsoft added to Microsoft Office 2007 and 2010.
• AutoShapes in the clipboard: SoftMaker Office now also reads and writes drawing objects in Office Open XML format in the clipboard. As a result, you can exchange AutoShapes and drawings with Microsoft Office 2010, even if you use the new drawing features of Microsoft Office 2010.

TextMaker 2012:

• The File/New dialog box shows a preview of the document templates.
• Optionally, TextMaker superscripts the letters of ordinal numbers (such as 2nd or 3rd).
• When you enter an Internet address such as www.softmaker.com, it will optionally be automatically converted to a hyperlink.
• If you open a plain-text file, TextMaker automatically applies the paragraph style “Text only” (which you can modify to your liking).
• There are functions to search for the next or previous spelling error in a document.
• Numbered lists and fields such as “Page number” and “Page count” now support also Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic numbering systems.
• When you insert a page number, you may choose between the absolute page number and the page number relative to the start of the chapter.
• You now also edit fields: If you select a field and then run the Insert/Field command, the dialog shows the properties of the current field, and you can modify them as desired.
• When inserting database fields, you are now able to set the number of decimals, and you can decide whether you want a thousands separator inserted or not.

SoftMaker Presentations 2012:

• You can now access PPTX files (OK, that’s a pretty big new feature…)
• SoftMaker Presentations now read and write password-protected PPT files.
• You can create slide shows where sounds play across multiple slides.
• In master slide view, you can now easily copy existing designs.

I have already talked about many of the changes in PlanMaker 2012 in another blog post.

Today I want to let you know some more interesting details about the upcoming TextMaker 2012 word processor. In short, formatting becomes much easier in this new version:

1. The dialog boxes for paragraph styles and character styles now show a preview of each stylesheet, and they tell you exactly what formatting a specific stylesheet contains:

If you look closely at the screenshot above (click on it to enlarge it), you will see that there are now options to create or update a stylesheet from existing formatting, too.

2. An eminently useful sidebar: SoftMaker Presentations has had it since version 2010, now we have added it to TextMaker 2012.

(Click on the individual screenshots to enlarge them)

The sidebar allows you to quickly navigate your documents. You can have it show all headings, all bookmarks, all footnotes, all tables, all pictures, or all objects. A simple click on one places the cursor in the chosen location.

You can switch to a view of all your paragraph styles or character styles and then format your document in any way you like. Point the mouse at a stylesheet, and a small tooltip appears that displays the formatting contained in a style (“Arial, 8pt, red”).

To put it simply, the new sidebar makes navigation and formatting much easier and more efficient.

If you have looked closely at the screenshots above, you might have noticed our new zoom slider in the status bar. Admittedly, we are not the first to offer it, but we found it so useful that we have added the zoom slider to TextMaker 2012, PlanMaker 2012, and SoftMaker Presentations 2012.

3. Table AutoFormat: If you think that formatting text means work, then don’t even start making tables nicer. Maybe you want the title row to stand out, maybe the first column. Or perhaps you prefer alternating row colors? This can quickly become a major effort. Not so anymore in TextMaker 2012 because we added an AutoFormat command for tables. It offers many well-designed styles for tables that can be applied with a single mouse click.

Ab sofort gibt es einen separaten deutschsprachigen Blog von SoftMaker.

In diesem finden Sie alle bisher in den englischsprachigen Blog eingestreuten deutschen Beiträge. Bitte benutzen Sie ab sofort die neue Adresse http://www.softmaker.de/blog.

SoftMaker Office 2012 will be released this year. Right now, we are preparing the public beta test which will soon be announced.

To whet your appetite, we will be talking about the new features and improvements in SoftMaker Office 2012 in the coming weeks here at the SoftMaker Blog. Be sure to come back regularly to find out about the latest news.

Let’s start with PlanMaker 2012. It closes the last remaining compatibility gaps with Microsoft Excel:

• XLSX import now also allows seamless access to XLSX files created in Microsoft Excel 2010.
• PlanMaker 2012 can now also save in XLSX format, which means that Excel 2007 and 2010 can access your PlanMaker calculations without taking the detour to XLS format.
• User-defined number formats are now fully Excel-compatible. Even the most complicated user-defined formats will now be imported and exported correctly.
• Finally, we added the format Format/Cell/Text that lets you format cells as text even if you enter numeric values.
• PlanMaker 2012 supports charts not only on worksheets but also on separate chart sheets.

But better compatibility was not the only thing we worked on. We also added new features, such as data consolidation, a command to split cell contents to multiple columns, new chart types, and commands for automatically removing empty rows and duplicate values.

And Excel diehards will gladly find that the commands Copy down and Copy from left are now also supported by PlanMaker.

The public beta test for SoftMaker Office for Android will start soon. We spent the last few months not only to simply port our software to Google Android, but also to design a new user interface that is finger-friendly and perfectly tuned to Android.

We have decided to use native Android control elements for the user interface (menus, dialogs, toolbars). As a result, SoftMaker Office is a true Android application with true Android feeling.

SoftMaker Office supports, of course, the usual menus that appear when you press the Menu button. It can be operated however much more quickly through toolbars.

In each SoftMaker application, you can find a toolbar with the most important commands at the bottom of the screen. Some execute a command directly, some open a secondary toolbar. For example, clicking on the “A” icon will activate the Formatting toolbar. It appears immediately above the main toolbar and offers functions covering the formatting of your document.

Care for a picture? Here we go…

You can click away the Formatting toolbar just as fast to reclaim the full display for your document. Other icons in the main toolbar open a menu directly. For example, clicking on the magnifying glass shows a menu for choosing the zoom level at which your document renders.

All applications in SoftMaker Office for Android support this modern user interface. You will be amazed how fast you can work with it.

You may like it or not, but there’s no denying: The file formats DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX that have been introduced by Microsoft with MS Office 2007 are on the rise. Microsoft’s sheer market dominance is responsible for that, but also the complacency of many users who don’t spend a thought on which file formats they share their documents in.

SoftMaker Office 2010 comes with mature filters for DOCX (Word) and XLSX files (Excel). Our competitors have started offering their filters earlier than we did, but our own testing revealed always severe quality issues with them. It’s good to see that the trade press is starting to come to similar conclusions: Germany’s leading computer rag c’t published a comparison of OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice and investigated how well both handle DOCX files.

Here are the sobering results:

In both packages [OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice], import worked only deficiently and was at best suitable for very simple text files. Even in those very simple text files, text was consistently laid out differently from Microsoft Word, and pictures were nearly always placed wrong. Even though OpenOffice and LibreOffice imported headings, numbering, and footnotes, they formatted the document in a completely different way from the original. Both packages handle Microsoft’s current Office file formats equally bad, and the import/export filters should be revised from the ground up before documents could be exchanged trouble-free. That there is a better way is demonstrated by SoftMaker whose TextMaker word processor handled the current Microsoft Word file format much more competently.

In our tests, LibreOffice’s export [to DOCX format] was successful only with the simplest of text files. More sophisticated documents could not even be opened in Word 2010. All attempts were answered by Word 2010 with an error message. But [for those documents that could be opened in Word 2010] the formatting was not correct in even a single case even with primitively structured documents. This made file exchange impossible in practice.

As some of you might already know, we are currently working on SoftMaker Office for Android. We plan to offer SoftMaker Office for Android phones, tables, and netbooks, so that users of these systems can finally use our powerful office suite.

TextMaker, PlanMaker, and SoftMaker Presentations for Android offer the same high degree of compatibility with the Microsoft Office file formats as their desktop counterparts under Windows and Linux. This means that, for the first time, a fully compatible office suite will be available for Android – one that supports change tracking, is able to correctly display all AutoShapes and images, that can display comments like Microsoft Word does, and one that faithfully renders all Microsoft Excel charts.

We will announce the public beta test at a later time. In the meantime, here are some screenshots to whet your appetite…

Our World Cup campaign is officially over now. Thanks to your numerous orders, we have been able to collect € 4215 (around US$ 5300) in donations. This has exceeded our expectations wildly. A heartfelt thank-you to all of you.

I have already reported on how we used the first 2000 Euros. Here is now an overview on the new donations:

• Kick it! Football for the future in South Africa
• A mini soccer field for orphans in Bulgaria
• Shoes for Africa
• CARE Haiti: Care for traumatized children
• Horse therapy for children with disabilities

Also, I’d like to update a few statistics… How did our customers decide to split the discount?

• 45% decided to keep the discount to themselves.
• 25% gave half to our charity projects and kept the other half.
• 30% were so generous to donate the full discount.

This means that 25% + 30% = 55% decided to support our projects with their donations. A special thank-you to everyone of them!