SoftMaker has released a public beta of its office suite for Windows Mobile devices and Windows computers. SoftMaker Office includes full-featured replacements for the mobile versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint that ship with Windows Mobile devices. SoftMaker Office normally runs $70 if you just want the mobile version, or $100 if you also want the PC software. But during the public beta period, you can download the whole suite of applications for free. The beta software isn't crippled in any way, but it will expire after a month or so.
So what does SoftMaker have that Office Mobile doesn't? For one thing, you can open and edit PowerPoint presentations without converting them to another format or losing any data. Here are a few other nifty features:
- Save documents as PDF files
- Save documents in the OpenDocument format used by OpenOffice.org
- PlanMaker (the spreadsheet application) has 330 calculation functions
- Multi-language spell-checker in TextMaker (the word processor)
- Support for footnotes and endnotes, and tables in TextMaker
[via Just Another Mobile Monday]
