Softmaker Office available for free - for both Lin and Win

[curaga]

http://loadandhelp.com/home-en.html

Never used it, actually this is the first time I heard about it. Good to know anyway.

[mcewanw]

It is very very good. SM Office 2008 version reads and writes MS format files very accurately (except for docx, which is apparently going to be handled by the next SM Office version): I've been using the MS windows over wine for months now. It's also very small in install size and resource usage in comparison to Open Office and much much faster/interactive in terms of operation.

There is no better office product out there for Linux - highly recommended (I've no connection at all with SM company, I just love the product).

[Edit: the earlier SM 2006 Linux version is also good to have - it has a very small install size and resource usage generally and runs lightning fast on even old PII or PIII class computers - makes an Abiword/Gnumeric combination a waste of space in comparison I'm afraid]

[jpeters]

[Edit: the earlier SM 2006 Linux version is also good to have - it has a very small install size and resource usage generally and runs lightning fast on even old PII or PIII class computers - makes an Abiword/Gnumeric combination a waste of space in comparison I'm afraid]

..except office2008 runs 124M, and gnumeric is 11M.  Abiword is 4.2M.   

[tclfan]

I tested Ashampoo Office 2008 and 2010, which  are re-branded Soft Office 2008 and 2010 recently. I can tell by now, this is a fantastic product. In addition to directly writing and read MS Office format files (Word, Excel and PP, although 2008 version writes doc and xls, but 2010 version writes also docx and xlsx) they have an option to be officially installed on a flash drive as portable applications and used on any PC from those USB sticks. When installed as portable on usb, SoftOffice 2008 takes about 50 M and 2010 version portable takes about 100M on USB stick.
Comparison with Gnumeric, which I used to use before discovering SoftOffice both are excellent, hovever:
1. Neither one has pivot tables capability
2. Gnumeric does not handle MS Office 2007 files
In a word, SoftOffice (aka Ashampoo Office) is replacing MS Office on my PC. SoftOffice is way faster than MS Office 2007 and feels faster than MS Office 2003 and if you do not need pivot tables in spreadheet, I do not see any significant difference in functionality.
At this point SoftOffice 2008 can be obtained free and SoftOffice 2010 has a small retail price - about 10% of MS bloat.
Lightning fast SoftOffice is key for me.

[jpeters]

hm....I wonder why mine is 124M on the HD (office2008).   It's Softmaker?

I wonder why it doesn't read OO files?  

Edit: Spell dict is 44M (multilingual)

[tclfan]

On disk, when installed, it takes this much space. When installed on usb stick it takes 50M. When installed as portable on usb, it consolidates common code of all three and copies only the necessary part.
I think it does read OO files, at least it says so.  I did not try this myself though... I did test thoroughly MS Office format though and it retains format extremely well.
In general I think I would not be far off if I say it blows the socks off OO... It appears to be tremendously faster than OO, no bloat, etc...
Gnumeric was also much better spreadsheet (INMO) than OO, except OO 'Pivot tables' equivalent. Unfortunately Gnumeric was (or became) a virtually one person project...
Good things come in small packages, not bloat.