ThinkFree Office Suite
Software Review by Aaron RennertThinkFree Office Suite consists of four programs similar to the office suites of other well known software producers. WRITE, is the word processing program. CALC is a spreadsheet program. And SHOW, is a presentation program. A fourth program called THINKFREE FOLDERS, is a folder/file management program similar to Windows Explorer. The documentation that came with the suite claims that the files produced by ThinkFree are interchangeable with Microsoft Office Suite. It also states that the suite will work with Macs as well as all versions of Windows, up to and including XP. On the front of the CD package that I received for review, it said "Built for Mac OS-X". That may account for some of the problems I ran into when using the suite on my PC.
When installing the program, Setup puts a message on the screen claiming you need a program called JavaSoft v1.3.1 or the program will not operate. It then asks if you would like to download it from the disk. If you click No, Setup will cancel. Since the CD contains only the Setup program and not separate files and/or folders, there is no way to avoid adding JavaSoft to your computer. When loading JavaSoft on the computer, you are given
a choice of placing it on the C:\ drive or another drive or folder. Not so with the ThinkFree suite itself. The Setup program lists "C:\Program Files \ThinkFree Office" as the destination and does not give you the option to place it elsewhere. There is no browse button and the destination box is grayed out to prevent overwriting.I have two computers that I use at home. One is about a year newer than the other. On one, ThinkFree installed almost without a hitch. On the second one, the computer hung up when Setup tried to install JavaSoft. Without a way to bypass JavaSoft the main program would not install. Whether this is a glitch in the program or the fact that my computer is a PC, I cannot say. The machine does have Windows 98SE on it with all the necessary critical updates, and I have had no problems installing other programs on it.
While working with the various programs in the suite, several problems became apparent. As individual components, each of the programs worked after a fashion. However, I found it impossible to insert a small ThinkFree Calc spreadsheet into a ThinkFree Write file. The programs do not seem to work together seamlessly. For this review I will concentrate on ThinkFree Write.
While Write is part of a suite, it has many of the limitations of NotePad and WordPad. When starting a new document you can go to Page Setup and Format, change your margins, page size, font, line spacing, and other parameters. However, there is no way to make these changes your permanent defaults. When you start a new document, the settings will return to the factory defaults. Write installs no fonts of it’s own. It’s default font is something called Serif, which is Times New Roman, but all of the fonts on your computer can be used in Write documents. The same cannot be said of Write symbols. Trying to insert a symbol such as a ® or a ? into a document was a hopeless case. The only subset symbols which appeared on the screen were some of the Basic Latin. None of the other subsets, most of which, from the names, appeared to be Asian, could be seen. When saving a document, you are limited to the extensions wrf (ThinkFree), rtf, doc, txt, htm, and html. No other formats are listed. Some of the changeable items are measured in pixels, with no way to change them to inches.
ThinkFree does have some assets though. One of the drop down list in the Insert menu is a list of form fields you can place directly into your document. Things such as One Line Text Box, Pushbuttons, Radio Buttons, Scrolling Text Boxes, etc. It also lists some HTML code for those who want to create home pages.
While ThinkFree Office would serve a beginner starting to learn to use an office suite, it would have too many problems for the power user to feel comfortable with. I can think of at least two reasons why this might be so. When installing, the program inferred that this was a trial copy, good for thirty days. Possibly a full copy would work properly. As I stated earlier, the suite is "built" for a Mac rather than the PC, even though other indications claim that it will work with all versions of Windows. Maybe, if installed on a Mac it would work with all the facilities it should have.
ThinkFree Corporation
19200 Stevens Creek Blvd
Suite 100
Cupertino, CA 95014
www.thinkfree.com
SRP $49.95