ThinkFree Office: Powerful, familiar office suite for Windows, Mac, and Linux

Filed under: Internet, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Office, Web services, Freeware, web 2.0

ThinkFree Office: Powerful, familiar office suite for Windows, Mac, and Linux

by Brad Linder Apr 8th 2008

Office suites like Google Docs and Zoho Office have been busy adding offline access to let you access and edit spreadsheets, text, and presentation documents in a web browser whether you're connected to the internet or not. But paying ThinkFree customers have had this ability since last year.

That's because ThinkFree offers two products: an online, web-based office suite and a Microsoft Office-compatible suite for the desktop. Users can synchronize data between the web service and their desktops. But up until this week, users had to pay $50 for access to the desktop software. Now, as expected, ThinkFree has launched a free version of its desktop software.

Now, here's the interesting thing. You don't even need to sign up for an account to download the desktop software. So if you have no need for an online office suit, synchronization, or 1GB of free online storage space for your office documents, you can just treat ThinkFree Office as a free alternative to Microsoft Office, OpenOffice.org, or whatever you've been using. But you will need to sign up for an account since ThinkFree will only save files if you have an account. Files will also automatically be saved to a ThinkFree folder for synchronizing with the web service. If you don't want to synchronize your files with the server, just never login again.

The applications can open and save documents in a variety of formats including Office 97 - 2007, PDF, RTF, and CSV. ThinkFree Write, Calc, and Show also do a great job of opening documents we've created using other applications, recognizing features like notes in our spreadsheets that other free tools like Gnumeric miss.

Tags: office, synchronization, thinkfree, tweet-this

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

jameslentini said 7:35AM on 4-09-2008

Just signed-up for ThinkFree, installed the software, validated my account. However, as soon as I log in to ThinkFree, after a few second I am logged out. The "you are logged in" / "you are logged out" indicator pop up my screen one after the other. Thus I can't use the product's online connection and sync. I tried uninstalling/reinstalling; clearing my online caches; etc.

CASTALL said 7:37AM on 4-09-2008

The interface was too slow in response time for me to seriously consider using as a default office suite. The suite seems to default to online storage mode vs local mode; which can only be accessed once you initiate the online connection widget.

This might have some potential as a viable alternative office suite if the focus wasn't so rooted in being an online application. The User Interface is laid out nicely, I didn't dig into much however as my patience wore thin.

Ted W said 11:02AM on 4-09-2008

"a free alternative to ... OpenOffice.org"? How much did you pay for OpenOffice?

Jody Goldberg said 7:59AM on 4-10-2008

Please provide a sample of something Gnumeric misses. We've supported notes for several years.

Brad Linder said 8:01AM on 4-10-2008

All I know is that last time I opened an important Office spreadsheet in Gnumeric and saved it, I lost all of my notes. This was probably about a year ago.

Jody Goldberg said 6:01AM on 4-14-2008

Sounds like you were using 1.6.x or older. 1.8.x exports cell comments.

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