The better Office alternative: SoftMaker Office bests OpenOffice.org

In the kingdom of business productivity, Microsoft Office reigns supreme. Its dominating position atop the word processing, spreadsheet, and presentations heap seems virtually unassailable. Its file formats define an industry, and its component applications are often synonymous with the underlying tasks they perform. That’s not a presentation file you’re displaying — it’s a PowerPoint deck. You don’t punch numbers into a spreadsheet; you update your Excel Workbook. And if you’re going to send out that memo company-wide, better make sure it’s attached as a Word doc.

There’s no doubt about it: Office’s roots run deep — deeper, even, than its host OS, Microsoft Windows. People talk about switching Windows versions all the time. However, few souls are willing to walk away from their current version of Office for fear of losing interoperability with their peers, a fact that makes dislodging this sprawling, well-entrenched entity all the more daunting — though many alternative productivity suites and SaaS offerings continue to try.

For would-be Office competitors, to even consider taking on the king of the hill requires that you first master the lingua franca of the Office file formats — a task that’s a lot trickier than it sounds. In fact, until you can successfully exchange data with the market leader (and by “successfully,” I mean “seamlessly,” without any significant rendering quirks or data loss), few independent users and no Microsoft-oriented IT shop will take you seriously.

So it was with an eye toward the all-important requirement of seamless interoperability that I evaluated the latest and greatest that the competition has to offer. In the following sections, I take a look at OpenOffice.org 3.1 and SoftMaker 2008 to determine if these suites have what it takes to stage the ultimate palace coup and bring down the king once and for all. I also explore the recently leaked Microsoft Office 2010 Community Technical Preview (CTP) build and explain why I believe that the company’s flagship productivity offering is so hard to kill. (Hint: It’s the ecosystem, stupid.)

Finally, I’ve put together a rogue’s gallery of interoperability blunders that I documented during lab testing. Some of these examples you need to see in order to believe. And for the truly curious, I’ve provided a link to the Word 2003 “torture test” document used to expose the current state of third-party Microsoft file format compatibility.

All in all, my trip through these Office killers was quite the adventure. Grab a cup of coffee, fire up your favorite Office alternative, and see if my harrowing experiences with OpenOffice.org 3.1 and SoftMaker Office 2008/2009 ring familiar.

OpenOffice.org 3.1: Pretender to the throne OpenOffice.org 3.1 is the latest incarnation of the free open source community’s most visible business productivity suite. A close cousin of the legendary StarOffice commercial product from Sun Microsystems and the source of numerous variants, including IBM Lotus Symphony, OpenOffice.org is frequently cited as the most viable competitor to Microsoft’s ubiquitous Office platform. However, the suite has consistently failed to make significant inroads with IT, prompting OpenOffice proponents to concoct all manner of excuses for why it keeps falling short (see “Why is Microsoft Office so hard to kill?” for examples).

With the release of version 3.1, OpenOffice.org advocates are hoping that the latest round of feature enhancements and performance improvements will help the suite break through with IT decision makers. A quick perusal of the release notes would seem to offer reason for optimism. First off, OpenOffice.org 3.1 is faster. It now takes less time to launch the individual applications, and such components as the Calc spreadsheet receive additional tuning to improve the performance of various common functions. Calc also receives some much needed usability tweaks, including better sheet renaming (just double-click the tab label and start typing) and improved sorting that respects column headers. Likewise, Writer receives a new commenting system and better file locking so that it plays better in a mixed OpenOffice/Microsoft Office network environment.

In fact, Microsoft Office interoperability is one of the major themes for version 3.1, with new import support for documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in Office 2007’s native Open XML file format. However, as I discovered during comprehensive lab testing, that support remains mostly skin deep. Complex Word documents, with lots of embedded charts and drawings, still trip up Writer, while Excel workbooks with external data links are rendered impotent by Calc’s lack of connectivity to critical back-end resources.

[ Compare how OpenOffice.org 3.1 and SoftMaker Office 2008 handled our complex Office documents. ]

I evaluated OpenOffice.org 3.1 under the 32-bit version of Windows Vista with Service Pack 2. Installation of the suite was straightforward, with the setup program automatically establishing file associations between OpenOffice’s component applications and various data file types, including Microsoft Office. However, when I attempted to test these associations by launching a Microsoft Word 2003-formatted document, Write completely botched the import process. Numerous embedded AutoShape drawing objects were distorted beyond recognition, while hanging indents in the document’s bulleted lists were improperly aligned. Even simple things, like preserving boldfaced headers in a table, were broken by Writer’s quirky import filter.

The final straw was when I attempted to save the document, then reopen it under Word. I found that, after a pass through Writer’s export filter, the drawing objects became further mangled, while the placement of various section and paragraph headers had been skewed to the right. Worse still, when I attempted to import the same file in Word 2007 format — one of the new capabilities touted by OpenOffice.org 3.1 advocates — Writer thrashed the document, replacing all of the embedded charts and drawings with a bunch of indecipherable text crammed into the top few lines of the first page.

Curious to see if these problems were isolated to Writer’s import/export filters, I tried saving the document in Open Document Format (ODF) from within Microsoft Word, then opening it inside of OpenOffice. Again, the document was rendered incorrectly, with several chart objects missing and various formatting anomalies quite visible. Resaving the ODF document in Writer, then reopening it in Word showed that the data loss was indeed permanent: The missing charts were nowhere to be found, while the aforementioned malformed bulleted lists and other layout errors remained.

Moving on to Calc, I discovered that importing an Excel workbook with external SQL links meant severing all ties to the back-end SQL Server that served up the raw data. Instead of a dynamically updateable range of cells, I was left with a bunch of static values. Worse still, saving the document in Calc, then reopening it under Excel caused the link configurations to the original SQL data source to be permanently lost. Given the complexity of many real-world custom Excel solutions — financial services firms are known to run multigigabyte simulations on their front-line trading workstations — such a hatchet job by OpenOffice’s import/export filter is potentially catastrophic.

I could go on quoting examples, but suffice to say that OpenOffice.org 3.1’s interoperability features were wholly inadequate. When the application thought it could successfully render an object, it often mangled it beyond recognition. When it became confused by, for example, an unfamiliar chart type or an unsupported configuration parameter, it simply discarded the extraneous data. It’s the kind of half-baked file format compatibility that keeps IT personnel awake at night.

Bottom line: OpenOffice.org 3.1 failed to deliver on its promise of better Microsoft Office interoperability. It severely mangled our Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel test data files, and no amount of new features or targeted performance improvements could overcome this critical deficiency. Factor in OpenOffice’s other well-documented warts — buggy Java implementation, CPU-hogging auto-update system, quirky font rendering — and it’s easy to see why the vast majority of IT shops continue to reject this pretender to the Microsoft Office throne.

SoftMaker Office 2009: An underdog with bite If OpenOffice 3.1 is the overhyped contender with the glass jaw, then SoftMaker Office 2008 is the plucky unknown quietly pounding on a side of beef in some meat locker (sorry, Rocky). Though not as ubiquitous as the free open source community’s favorite son, the commercially developed SoftMaker Office has proven itself to be a more viable competitor to Microsoft Office, especially in the low-end PC and mobile computing space. That’s because the German company behind the product, SoftMaker GmbH, has made a concerted effort to keep the SoftMaker Office code base lean and mean, while at the same time delivering a remarkable degree of functionality.

[ Compare how OpenOffice.org 3.1 and SoftMaker Office 2008 handled our complex Office documents. ]

The net result is a product that’s a fraction of the size of its competitors (just 70MB on disk) and that runs great on underpowered hardware. SoftMaker Office’s component applications — TextMaker, PlanMaker, and  SoftMaker Presentations — load almost instantly, and each consumes roughly half as much memory as their Microsoft Office equivalents. More importantly, SoftMaker Office demonstrates excellent word processor data file interoperability, including successfully loading, rendering, and saving our Microsoft Word 2003 torture test document.

This is a huge accomplishment for a tiny (17 people) company with limited resources. With its TextMaker application, SoftMaker has achieved what the combined forces of Sun Microsystems and the whole of the free open source community could not: reliably exchanging data files with Microsoft Word. Sadly, the suite’s interoperability prowess doesn’t extend to Microsoft Excel workbooks. Just as OpenOffice.org 3.1 failed to preserve the complex SQL connection plumbing that was used to drive my test workbook’s external data links, SoftMaker’s spreadsheet component, PlanMaker, likewise stripped out all of the link parameters. The resulting spreadsheet, though structurally intact, was essentially a collection of static cells. And as with OpenOffice’s Calc, any subsequent save operation from within PlanMaker meant that those connection parameters were lost for good.

I belabor this point because, despite the myriad whizz-bang features and nifty timesavers that make up a modern spreadsheet application, it is ultimately a product’s ability to access and manipulate business-critical data sets that defines its utility. And in the case of number crunching under Windows, Microsoft has set the bar quite high by incorporating extensive data integration features and encouraging customers to build ever more complex applications that feature Excel as the front end (see “Why is Microsoft Office is so hard to kill?” for more on this).

The SoftMaker folks say they’re aware of this and are working to expand PlanMaker’s connectivity with future releases. In the meantime, SoftMaker Office 2008 remains an attractive product, especially for IT shops with limited use of external data. Its lightweight architecture and zippy performance on low-end systems make it a good alternative to Microsoft Office in mobile environments. And the inclusion of BasicMaker — a scripting engine compatible with Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) — means it’s easy for in-house developers to migrate at least some of their custom solutions to the SoftMaker platform. Add to this a modest price point of $79.95 per seat and you begin to see why I believe SoftMaker Office is the hidden gem of the productivity suite category.

As of this writing, SoftMaker was preparing its next-generation suite, SoftMaker Office 2009. The product was still in beta at press time, but my limited experience with an early build left me impressed by the development direction. For starters, SoftMaker Office 2009 will support importing data files from Office 2007 in its native Open XML format. And from what I could glean while experimenting with the beta code, the process works far better than under OpenOffice.

For example, TextMaker 2009, which successfully imported and rendered my Word 2007 test document, included virtually all of the inline charts and drawings. SoftMaker plans to provide similar support for Microsoft Excel 2007 workbooks (but still no external data access) and PowerPoint 2007 presentations, in addition to introducing its first foray into the client database category with its new DataMaker 2009 product, essentially a Microsoft Access work-alike.

[ See the sidebars to this review: Office-compatibility torture test | The many faces of OpenOffice | Why is Microsoft Office so hard to kill? ]

Bottom line: SoftMaker Office shows that good things often still come in small packages. The product’s compact footprint and low overhead make it ideal for underpowered systems, and its excellent compatibility with Office 2003 file formats means it’s a safe choice for heterogeneous environments where external data access isn’t a priority. With a promising beta release just around the corner, SoftMaker’s star is definitely on the rise.

King of the hill Microsoft Office has been king of the desktop productivity hill for decades now, and its reign shows no sign of nearing an end (see my preview of Microsoft Office 2010). For users who need only the most basic compatibility with Office formats, a number of offerings (SaaS apps from Google and Zoho, as well as IBM Lotus Symphony, and other OpenOffice variants, and OpenOffice.org and SoftMaker Office of course) may do the trick. But for shops needing deeper compatibility with Microsoft Office — to support complex documents, macros, and back-end links — there’s still no substitute.

Frankly, from Microsoft’s perspective, the danger may have been overstated. Though the free open source crowd talks a good fight, the truth is that they keep missing the real target. Instead of investing in new features that nobody will use, the team behind OpenOffice should take a page from the SoftMaker playbook and focus on interoperability first. Until OpenOffice works out its import/export filter issues, it’ll never be taken seriously as a Microsoft alternative.

More troubling (for Microsoft) is the challenge from the SoftMaker camp. These folks have gotten the file-format compatibility issue licked, and this gives them the freedom to focus on building out their product’s already respectable feature set. I wouldn’t be surprised if SoftMaker got gobbled up by a major enterprise player in the near, thus creating a viable third way for IT shops seeking to kick the Redmond habit.

In the meantime, Microsoft’s position atop the desktop productivity heap remains secure. If anything, OpenOffice’s latest failure bolsters the behemoth’s seemingly unassailable position. And now we have Office 2010 making an appearance (albeit unofficially), and it seems to have addressed many of the remaining usability and integration complaints. Add it all up and it translates into what should be a long, uninterrupted reign for the royal Redmondians.