SoftMaker has released two free and one kind of free office applications. First up, now that SoftMaker 2008 is available for Windows and Windows Mobile, the company has decided to offer the older SoftMaker Office 2006 Windows applications for free.

Like the current version of SoftMaker Office, which sells for about $80, the 2006 edition includes a word processor and spreadsheet application. SoftMaker office 2006 does not include SoftMaker Presentations, the PowerPoint-like presentation app that comes with the newer version. But while the older office suite might not have all the bells and whistles of the new version, the programs are pretty robust and they do support Office 2007 documents.

Softmaker is also giving away the free TextMaker Viewer 2008 application for Windows which lets you open, view, and print text-based documents including Word, OpenDocument, and RTF files.

Last, but not least, SoftMaker is beta testing the Linux version of SoftMaker office 2008 for Linux. You can request a registration key online and then download an RPM, DEB, or TGZ installer. I took the office suite for a spin on Ubuntu 8.04 and installation was as smooth as could be. I did find that PlanMaker, the spreadsheet application didn't recognize comments inserted in an Excel document I tried opening. But most functions seem to work as expected. If you're looking for an alternative to OpenOffice.org, SoftMaker Office might be worth checking out. The Linux beta expires on October 31st, after which there will either be a new beta or the office suite will be available for purchase.

The company also makes Office applications for Windows Mobile and Windows CE devices. But there are no freebies available at the moment. A full license for the Windows Mobile version will set you back $90.

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

SoftMaker Office 2008 will eat up about 20MB on your mobile device, so you'll probably want to install it to a storage card if you have one handy. The software is designed for Pocket PC 2000 and newer devices.

[via Just Another Mobile Monday]

PalmOS and Windows Mobile devices generally come with basic document viewing and editing software. You an create and edit simple spreadsheets and text documents. But if you want advanced features like editing footnotes or on-the-fly spell checking, you need to look elsewhere.

In the last month, two of the biggest names in handheld office suites have released updates. DataViz Documents To Go for PalmOS is up to version 9, and SoftMaker Office 2006 final edition for Pocket PC was released this week.

Some of the new features:

Documents To Go

• View and edit footnotes and endnotes in word processing files
• View and edit comments in word processing files
• Added new zoom levels for pictures and presentations
• Added an integrated file explorer
• There's no longer support for Word 95, Wordperfect, WordPro, RTF, Palm Doc, Excel 95, Word 6 for Mac files.
• There's also no longer support for Palm's Tungsten T, T2, Zire 21, Zire 31, Zire 71, or for what looks like pretty much Sony's entire line of PalmOS PDAs. For a complete list of changes, click the read link.
  

SoftMaker Office 2006

• Import OpenOffice.org and OpenDocument files
• Track changes to your document
• Improved filters for Microsoft Word and RT documents
• Split and Merge table cells
• Bibliography support

Documents To Go is available for $30 for the standard edition (just a word processor and spreadsheet), or $50 for the premium edition, (with support for PDF files, presentations, spell-checking, and other advanced features). Upgrades from an earlier version are $30

SoftMaker Office is available for $70. Or you can pick up just the spreadsheet or word processing software for $50 each. For $100 you can get the whole bundle plus versions of the software for Windows. Upgrade options are available as well. Both programs offer 30 day free trials of their software.

This morning, SoftMaker announced the final beta of TextMaker 2006 for Pcket PC. The beta is open until September 30th, and beta testers will have the opportunity to purchase a reduced-price version when the product is released. I've never used TextMaker on the PocketPC/Windows Mobile--I'm a Palm guy through and through--but TextMaker has been one of my favorite word processors since I got a free trial of it on SuSE supplemental apps CD a while back. It's fast, lean, and comes in production releases for the widest variety of OSes of any word processor on the market--at least any commercial word processor. At the moment, the beta is the only option I know of for viewing OpenOffice.org and OpenDoc format documents on a handheld.