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!

Unsere Rabattaktion zur Fußball-Weltmeisterschaft ist abgeschlossen, und dank Ihrer zahlreichen Bestellungen haben wir Spenden in Höhe von € 4215 zusammengetragen. Dies hat unsere Erwartungen weit übertroffen! Vielen Dank dafür.

Über die Verwendung der ersten 2000 Euro habe ich in diesem Blog schon berichtet. Hier eine Übersicht über die neuen Spenden:

• Kick it! Fussball für die Zukunft in Südafrika
• Ein Minifussballfeld für elternlose Jugendliche
• Schuhe für Afrika
• CARE Haiti: Betreuung für traumatisierte Kinder
• Therapie mit Pferden für behinderte Kinder

Interessant ist sicherlich auch, wie die Kunden mit dem angebotenen Rabatt umgegangen sind:

• 45% haben den Rabatt für sich selbst behalten.
• 25% haben den Rabatt zur Hälfte gespendet und zur Hälfte behalten.
• 30% waren großzügig und haben den gesamten Betrag gespendet.

Damit haben 25% + 30% = 55% unsere Hilfsprojekte mit ihren Spenden unterstützt. Dafür ein ganz besonderes Dankeschön!

[Click here for English]

Unsere Kampagne zur Fußballweltmeisterschaft ist gut gestartet! Dank der Großzügigkeit unserer Kunden konnten wir heute die ersten 2000 Euro an Jugendsportprojekte in aller Welt spenden.

Dies sind die Projekte, die wir heute unterstützt haben:

• AMANDLA – Bildung durch Fußball
• Boxgirls Berlin – Train hard, Fight easy
• Girls!unlimited
• Ein Minifußballfeld für elternlose Jugendliche
• Kick it! Fußball für die Zukunft in Südafrika

Klicken Sie auf die Links, um detaillierte Projektbeschreibungen zu erhalten.

Unsere Kampagne läuft bis zum 11. Juli, dem Tag des Finalspiels der Fußballweltmeisterschaft. Bis dahin können Sie die Gelegenheit nutzen, unsere starke Software zu erhalten und gleichzeitig Gutes zu tun.

Und nun einige interessante Statistiken… Wie haben unsere Kunden den Rabatt aufgeteilt?

• 43% haben den Rabatt für sich selbst behalten.
• 21% haben den Rabatt zur Hälfte gespendet und zur Hälfte behalten.
• 36% waren großzügig und haben den gesamten Betrag gespendet.

Damit haben 21% + 36% = 57% unsere Hilfsprojekte mit ihren Spenden unterstützt. Ein herzliches Dankeschön an alle!

Lesen Sie mehr über unsere Kampagne

Our new Soccer World Cup 2010 campaign got off to a very good start! Thanks to the generosity of our customers, we were able to donate the first 2000 Euros (around USD 2500) to youth sport projects around the world.

Here are the projects we supported today:

• AMANDLA – Football for Development
• Boxgirls Berlin – Train hard, Fight easy
• Girls!unlimited
• A mini-soccer field for Bulgarian orphans
• Kick it! Football for the future in South Africa

Click on each link to find a detailed project description. Please note that not all descriptions are available in English.

Our campaign runs until July 11, the day of the finals of the Soccer World Cup 2010 in South Africa. Please use this opportunity to get some great software from SoftMaker and do good at the same time.

And now for some interesting statistics… How did our customers decide to split the discount?

• 43% decided to keep the discount to themselves.
• 21% gave half to our charity projects and kept the other half.
• 36% were so generous to donate the full discount.

This means that 21% + 36% = 57% helped support our projects with their donations. A heartfelt thank-you to everyone of you!

Find out more about our Soccer World Cup campaign

This blog has run a bit dry in the last few months, primarily to a severe work overload for me. But today I have a big announcement for you: SoftMaker Office 2010 for Windows Mobile has been released today!

If you are a Windows Mobile user, you will probably have heard about SoftMaker Office. So, I’ll spare you the details and keep the advertising to a minimum. Let’s say just that: If you are serious about editing Word, Excel, and/or PowerPoint files on a Pocket PC or other Windows Mobile device and you don’t like having the formatting or content damaged, there is no way around SoftMaker Office. It is the only full-fledged mobile office suite, and it provides seamless roundtripping of Office files.

So, what’s new in SoftMaker Office 2010 for Windows Mobile? A lot! Such as:

• TextMaker reads and writes DOCX files from Word 2007 and 2010 flawlessly. That’s something that even many competing office suites on the desktop fail to achieve.
• PlanMaker lets you open and edit XLSX files from Excel 2007 and 2010, keeping all formulas and formatting intact.
• PlanMaker has beautiful charts. Scroll down in this blog for some examples. The same chart tools that we have for Windows are available on Windows Mobile.
• An improved spell checker that gives really good suggestions for misspelled words
• More speed and more capacity in PlanMaker
• Document tabs

Document tabs on a small Pocket PC screen? Yup. If you’ve tried them, you’ll love them and gladly give up a few pixels on the screen. Besides, they are optional. So, if space is at a premium, turn off the tabs. If space is really at a premium, switch to full-screen mode. If that’s still not enough, consider switching to a PC for editing your files…

We completely overhauled the charting engine in PlanMaker 2010. Now you can make your own TV- or magazine-quality charts with minimal effort.

I’ll simply show you some:

PlanMaker 2010 is the most significant rewrite of PlanMaker since 2001. Internally, all data structures have been changed so that PlanMaker will be able to work with much larger data sets than in the past.

The first visible sign is that the row capacity is now set at 65536 instead of 16384 rows.

We will increase this even further (up to 1 million) when our XLSX export filter is done – the regular XLS file format cannot store anything beyond 65536 rows, and our own PMD format is a slight variation on XLS. It therefore has the same limit.

In order to handle these larger row sets, we had to bring down memory requirements and increase the speed of all sheet operations. This means that even now, while we are still at 65536 rows, PlanMaker 2010 should be faster and require less RAM memory than PlanMaker 2008.

Let’s look at some of the new worksheet features:

• External references: This has been a longstanding wish from PlanMaker users. Finally, with PlanMaker 2010 you can link to other workbooks in your calculations. Like in Excel, you choose how and when those calculations are updated.
• Select multiple sheets: With PlanMaker 2010, you can select several sheets in the sheet register and apply formatting operations on all of them simultaneously. For example, if you wish to change the paper format, simply select all worksheets and then call the File/Page setup command.
• Formula auditing: When things go wrong in elaborate worksheets, you need a “debugger”. Formula auditing is such a “worksheet debugger”. It can be used to plot dependencies between cells, to mark invalid input in cells (cells containing values that violate their input validation settings), and trace errors.
• A Repeat command: One nice thing in Excel is the Edit/Repeat command. It simply repeats the last operation on the current set of data. Immensely useful, and PlanMaker 2010 has it now, too. What we did not copy is the mysterious way that Excel uses to swap the Redo and the Repeat command in and out of the Edit menu. We simply have two separate commands without magic hide-and-seek…
• Search on steroids: The Search function has been overhauled, too. You can now search across multiple sheets, and what’s even nicer is that you can choose to have PlanMaker display a “hit list”. All cells or comments or frames matching the search term are shown in a list, and you can jump between them by clicking in the list.
• Paste special with extras: The command Edit/Paste special now allows you not only to paste data in different ways, but (like in Excel) combine the pasted values with the pasted-over values. We offer Add, Substract, Multiply, and Divide. Additionally, you can transpose cells, skip empty cells, and choose which part of the formatting (the number format, the character format, the shading etc.) to paste and which not.
• A wizard for text file import: Now you can do nearly anything when importing text files. PlanMaker supports a large variety of character sets and lets you determine which columns are imported as text and which as numbers, currencies, dates, times, etc. Furthermore, you decide whether to import separator-delimited files (with freely chooseable delimiters) or fixed-width files. A preview always shows what the import will look like with the current settings.
• A wizard for text file export: Same story when saving to text files. Here, PlanMaker’s preview will also display those characters from your worksheet in red that cannot be stored in the chosen character set.
• Wizards for dBASE import and export: You can do similar things when importing and exporting dBASE files.
• Scenarios are great for “what if” calculations. You can set up multiple scenarios with variable values and then “play” with the numbers to reach informed decisions.

In my next post, I’ll talk about the great charting features that PlanMaker 2010 comes with.

Microsoft Word 2007 by default uses a different file format from its predecessors: DOCX. Our customers have been asking for DOCX import in SoftMaker Office for quite some time.

I am happy to announce that TextMaker 2010 comes with excellent support for opening DOCX files.

Some customers asked us what took us such a long time, when OpenOffice.org has been providing DOCX import for several months now.

I was always tempted to answer with a counter question: Do you want DOCX support, or DOCX support that works?

I am not trying to be cheeky. Earnestly, I am appalled at what OpenOffice.org does to even rather simple DOCX files.

Here is a small comparison between TextMaker 2010 and the latest version (3.1.1) of OpenOffice.org:

TextMaker opens a DOCX file...

... and OpenOffice.org 3.1.1 tries its hand on the same file

In fact, I had a hard time finding any DOCX file that OpenOffice.org 3.1.1 was able to import without problems.

But wait, there’s one more thing: TextMaker 2010 will also be able to save in DOCX format. This makes it the only word processor apart from Microsoft Word 2007 that allows you to create documents in DOCX format.

The first piece of SoftMaker Office that you get in touch with is usually the Setup program. It guides the user through the installation and makes sure that everything is set up correctly.

I have to report one departure and extend one welcome greeting: Our existing Setup program will be officially retired with SoftMaker Office 2010. Farewell to you, we have been together for more than 9 years!

Setup is being replaced by an MSI (“Microsoft Installer”) archive, the Microsoft Windows standard for installation.

For a single user, the main advantage is that he or she will already know this installation program and feel familiar with it. This saves the user the time spent on figuring out options and lowers the barrier to trying out SoftMaker Office.

For corporate users who need to install the software on several (or many) workstations, MSI is a godsend as it allows you to deploy automatically across the network and use all the administrative tools that Microsoft provides for MSI-based installation, deinstallation, and software servicing.

As we are gearing up for the public beta test of SoftMaker Office 2010 for Windows, it’s time to make this announcement.

Anyone purchasing SoftMaker Office 2008 for Windows on or after October 1, 2009 at list price is entitled to a free upgrade to SoftMaker Office 2010 for Windows. This upgrade will be available by download, and there are no hidden “handling” charges. It’s really free.

For all other customers, there will be a reasonable upgrade price. Don’t ask me which one it will be, since I can’t tell you yet…