Review: ThinkFree Office is a worthy alternative


After a week of procrastination and some new frustrations with Office X (200+ MB), I finally took the plunge and tried out ThinkFree Office (33MB). In fact, after a few minutes of usage I trashed Word, PowerPoint and Excel from my system.

However, despite ThinkFree's coup now a fait accompli, my first impressions are mixed to say the least. Whereas reading, writing and manipulating Chinese text (ie two-byte characters) is an absolute dream, the application itself is a tad slow and it did crash once in my first full day of use. Moreover, like Microsoft's "industry-leading" (I prefer to think industry-restraining) suite, ThinkFree will "bollocks up" your stuff just like Word, PowerPoint or Excel do.

For example, I opened the company presentation file in ThinkFree Show (their presentation app) and it promptly changed the colors of all my bullets, lost a few of the pics and generally made a mess of the image layering (c'est la vie, n'est pas?). For those experienced with MS Office you're likely quite familiar with this phenomenon -- you're running Office X and you need to alter a presentation created using Office 97 (PC) -- just opening a file can unleash a rather unpleasant can of worms.

One area where I continually have problems with Office X, however, is opening Excel docs that contain Chinese text. With ThinkFree Calc, this is virtually painless. Although I had to manually assign a Chinese font in about half the files I opened, these docs displayed beautifully and, just as important, can be viewed/manipulated seamlessly by PC users of Redmond's bloatware (97, 2000, etc).

One feature I do miss from Office X is the "Send to -> Mail recipient" function. Further, although I am no big fan of Apple's "Services" menu, ThinkFree also lacks this as well. So, sending docs via e-mail is a bit more manual than I'd prefer, but the shear satisfaction of moving a step closer to being free of the "great whore of Redmond" makes these foibles more than bearable.

Whether you think of it as "feature rich" or "bug infested," ThinkFree Office behaves uncannily like Microsoft's Office. Just like "the real thing" it corrects mistakes (sometimes when they're not mistakes) and introduces chaos when you try to make an ordered list.

Also, in ThinkFree Write, for example, pressing "F12" brings up the "Save As" menu and "F7" invokes the spell checking utility. And, yes, of course, simple things like word count are in there too. So, functionality is both a mix of blessing and curse, but overall you should feel right at home.

ThinkFree Office's preferences and options are fairly straightforward and clear in comparison to those found in Office. However, unlike the latter, not all of the settings are available in one hugely confusing location, which is a minor hassle.

Bottomline nonsense

Well, in case you missed the reference above, Office X has been unceremoniously dumped (Entourage aside) from my office machine (12-inch iBook 900MHz, 640MB RAM) and I don't think that Microsoft's bloatware will be missed by either myself or any of the people I share files with.

For all of the features (and irritations), a user can purchase Office X -- Standard Edition for $230. Or, you could spend $50 on ThinkFree for most of the features and some of the irritation. Also, though I haven't successfully tried it as yet (technical difficulties they say), ThinkFree throws in 20MB of online storage for your stuff, as well as the ability to organize your stuff with ThinkFree Folders.

And, lastly, ThinkFree offers its Office suite as a 60-day demo, which is twice as long as Microsoft and its $49 billion in liquid assets allows. You do the math...

Editor's note: Goodness knows AppleWorks hasn't seen a serious update since before many of you were born and Office is bloated, difficult to configure and largely incompatible with everything including itself. So, is MS Office worth your money or do think ThinkFree a worthy replacement?

What's your take?