13 April 2010

The Sweetest Office Suite--Free, Fast and Built for Windows

Sorry for the pun.

Openoffice.org is just too slow. Even for when I had a Athlon X2 3600+ with 2 gigs of RAM. Slow meaning it took ages for it to load. Imagine the molasses hell I went through using Openoffice on this netbook. I used it on WinXP and now with Win7 and for the last time I'll say it was slow.

I did try Abiword and Gnumeric for a week or 2. I don't need to replace Powerpoint, Access, Onenote or Outlook. Just a word processor and spreadsheet is enough for me. This is for home use after all--not for school or work.

Abiword was ok but it had to install vcredist_x86.exe--which I can't stand. No fluff for me please.

Gnumeric was ok too but when I saved a file I was confronted with a file dialog that looked like it came from Gnome. It's superficial yes but I'd like Windows to look like Windows.

Which leads me to Softmaker Office 2006. It's free and it works just like Word and Excel 2003. Just the way I like it.

And yes it's fast enough for me.