Choosing a right office, especially free of charge, is not a easy task for anyone ! Apart from Open Office, there are some other office softwares that you want to take a look at it. One of them is Ashampoo Office 2008, it doesn't has many functions/ features as Microsoft Office, but if you want to find a free office, it certainly is a good candidate !

Ashampoo Office 2008 is supplied with the word processing tool Ashampoo TextMaker, the spreadsheet program Ashampoo PlanMaker and – brand new in the current version – the presentations software Ashampoo Presentations.

4 Free is about giving our feedbacks on the softwares from the free promotions. So , hoping that we’ll have more tech reactions in comments, here’s again Mike’s feedback from the previous article:

—– General —–

– This is the latest version 3.10. (I used the “FREE FULL activation” English link in the “Let’s start with the killer offer!” section near the bottom of Radu’s “Ashampoo: They Trick You, You Trick Them” page.)
– The testimonials at the SoftMaker site the guys listed above indicate this is a very good app. CNet”s Download.com shows a high user rating of 4/5 for 151 votes, with many comments.
– Memory useage tested with same .doc file: OpenOffice ~70 MB, TextMaker ~16 MB. (OO may shed ~20 MB after some time.)
– Installation size (main directory): OpenOffice ~400 MB, Ashampoo Office 2008 ~83 MB. (OO includes Draw, Math, and Base which are modules not included in Ash.)
– I did find that each of the 3 modules started quite fast.
– OpenOffice users that must open complex Excel documents may want to consider this app. See the comparisons for Excel/PlanMaker/OpenOffice 2.3 at Softmaker.com. I downloaded the files that OO 2.3 had problems with and tried them in my OO 3.0.1, and it still does not display them properly.

—– Compatibility with OpenOffice —–

– The Ashampoo link says that it also reads/exports OpenDocument formats, which are used by OpenOffice. But I found it opened only .odt (word processor) files, and not .ods (spreadsheets). I didn’t have any presentation files to test.
– I opened one of my logs which is basically a long 3-column table of date/time/activity. Many activity items include multi-level bulleted lists. The bullets and levels were not imported, which was a dealbreaker for this use.

I don’t use MS Office, so I couldn’t test compatibility, but comments and press indicate it’s pretty good.

How to grabb Ashampoo Office 2008 for free ?

1. Go to this promotion page and submit your registration, after filling in the required fields.

http://www.softmaker.de/reg/ash08_en.htm

( copy and paste in your browser )

2. You’ll receive the email containing the serial number and instructions. Note that there is also a download link for “Additional dictionaries and proofing tools (~ 13 MByte)”

3. Download the good installer ( 46,9 Mo ) from Ashampoo ( not the trial one )

http://download16.ashampoo.com/m/ashampoo_office2008_310_fm.exe

( copy and paste in your browser )

That’s it! Run the installer and don’t forget to register your product!

Note 1: The software has a nice built-in option to make it portable.

Note 2: Once fully activated, download and install the latest SoftMaker service pack for Office 2008 ( 20 MB ) from here.

http://www.softmaker.com/english/servofw8_en.htm

( copy and paste in your browser )

Enjoy!

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