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…

You probably won’t find these listed in any brochure from SoftMaker because they are considered “minor improvements” — here are ten useful new mini-features in PlanMaker:

1. AutoFill for numbered lists: Type ’1. then ’2. — you can then use AutoFill so that PlanMaker adds 3., 4., 5. etc.
2. Sheetwide “Hide zero values”: It was already possible to set “Do not show zeros” individually for cells. But PlanMaker 2010 also adds a sheetwide option that does it for all the cells on the sheet.
3. When you select cells with the mouse or keyboard, the size of the selection is now shown above the sheet, for example as “5R x 3C” for five rows, three columns.
4. The commands “Join cells” and “Split cells” are now in the context menu that is shown when you right-click in your worksheet.
5. So is the option “Word wrap”.
6. There is now a “scroll mode”: When it is active, moving the mouse up/down or left/right will move the worksheet. Ideal for browsing the spreadsheet’s data.
7. Instead of =A1+A2, you can now also type +A1+A2.
8. The toolbar now has a dropdown menu for different types of cell shading, very similar to the one for cell borders.
9. Instead of 3^4, you can also type 3**4.
10. If you don’t like the default colors for the little markers for comments and protection, you can choose your own.

Sometimes it’s good to step back and think a bit less Euro-centric. Our software has long supported loading and saving text files in the standard character sets: Windows, DOS, Unicode, UTF-8.

Good enough? Yes, for a Western European or American user. But if you are from Russia, Ukraine, Japan, China, Korea, or several other countries, you are likely to have text files in a plethora of encodings:

• The Russians and Ukrainians have KOI8-R, KOI8-U, code page 855, code page 1251, and ISO-8859-5.
• The Chinese have GB2312, GB2312_80, Big5, and a few more.
• The Koreans bring code page 1361, ISO-2022-KR, KSC5601, and EUC-KR to the table.
• And the Japanese have legacy documents in JIS, Shift-JIS, EUC-JP, and a several others.

I won’t even mention what Greece, Turkey, Thailand, the Baltics, Israel, and the Arab countries have encoded their documents in…

TextMaker 2010 and PlanMaker 2010 will come with big improvements here. They not only come with support for a ton of character sets, but let you also preview a file in different character sets – definitely a good thing when you have to guess the character set:

And when you save a file, you can also pick the character set. Here, the preview will mark all characters that cannot be exported to the destination character set with a red question mark:

PlanMaker 2010 offers the same, and a couple of things more:

• fixed-width import or import by delimiter
• choose the delimiter character
• choose a text marker (single quotes ‘ or double quotes “)
• resize the columns
• and, most importantly, set the column type

Setting the column type lets you declare a column to be text, numeric, date, boolean etc. Through this you can enforce a column to be imported, for example, as text even though it contains values that look like numbers:

You may have been wondering why no new blog posts have been forthcoming from me. I’ll just say “translation week”…

As you probably know, SoftMaker Office comes with menus and dialog boxes in more languages than just English and German.

In fact, SoftMaker Office 2010 will reach 17 languages:

1. US English
2. British English (ok, not really a separate language…)
3. German
4. French
5. Italian
6. Spanish
7. Portuguese
8. Dutch
9. NEW: Swedish
10. Russian
11. Hungarian
12. Bulgarian
13. Turkish
14. NEW: Greek
15. Simplified Chinese
16. Japanese
17. NEW: Arabic

Every time we add a new feature, this new feature needs some dialog boxes, some error messages, and menu entries. As soon as a sizable number of missing translations has been reached, our translators (freelancers across the world) fill in the missing translations. After quality control here in Germany, the translations are integrated into the software.

And this week was such a “translation week”. We had to integrate 13 different languages (German and the both Englishes we do on our own), which was quite a chunk of work. There’s your reason for me keeping mum.

Several customers from English-speaking countries asked us to provide a global setting to turn automatic hyphenation off.

That’s a feature request that I, as a German, never really understood. We Germans have a system called “word compounding” that lets you invent words on the fly. Basically an adhocsystemforgeneratingnewwords. When a language allows for such long words, you definitely want your word processor to do the hyphenation for you.

English has much shorter words, and the need for hyphenation is not as present. And some people avoid hyphenation because it makes words harder to read.

Now, you have been able to change the hyphenation settings in TextMaker since the very first version. However, it requires that you learn about modifying paragraph styles. Paragraph styles are definitely worth the effort of learning. But when all you want to do is turn off hyphenation, there should be an easier way.

In TextMaker 2010, there is. Featured prominently in the Tools menu, the new command Automatic Hyphenation turns hyphenation on or off globally in a document. You still have the fine-grained control in Format/Paragraph and Format/Paragraph Style, but the Tools menu is your quick route to controlling hyphenation documentwide.

One feature that users of SoftMaker Office have asked us repeatedly for indeed made it into SoftMaker Office 2010: the ability to assign symbols to hotkeys.

This means that you could, for example, assign the copyright symbol © to Ctrl-Shift-C or the “registered” sign ® to Alt+R. The same is true for any other character from the vast Unicode character table.

I am typing this from a hotel room in Korea. What caught my eye immediately upon entry was this:

A “Simple Descending Life Line”? How reassuring that I will be able, in case of an emergency, to jump off the window from the 9th floor and use my non-existent abseiling abilities, trusting a thin rope that is who knows how old…

That is, of course, if I am able to smash the window first, because it is blocked from opening.

It has been a long time in the making, but SoftMaker Office 2010 will finally support typing in Arabic and Hebrew.

Arabic and Hebrew stand out among the other languages by being written from right to left. That’s not the only problem: Numbers are still written from left to right, and Western words in Arabic and Hebrew texts, too. This continual switching of the typing direction caused us some troubles during development, but I am proud to say that we have solved them.

That’s not all, though. SoftMaker Office 2010 also:

• comes with an optional Arabic user interface
• supports both Arabic and Hindi numbers
• supports the Hijri (Islamic) calendar
• does all the character shaping required for the Arabic script
• and provides Arabic spell-checking.

Want to help us create a great Arabic/Hebrew office suite? If you understand Hebrew, Arabic, Farsi, or Urdu and wish to participate in the private beta test for SoftMaker Office 2010 for Windows, please go to our discussion forum at www.softmaker.com/forum and create a user account there. Then send an e-mail request for participation in the beta test to apply@softmaker.de mentioning your forum name and your Arabic/Hebrew qualifications.