Microsoft Office is probably the most widely-used office suite in the world, but that doesn't necessarily mean you can't use other office packages instead. SoftMaker Office is one of them.

SoftMaker Office includes four applications: TextMaker, a text processor that works with DOC and DOCX; PlanMaker, a fully Excel-compatible spreadsheet; BasicMaker, a coding editor to create BASIC macros and automate certain tasks;and finally SoftMaker Presentations, a powerful yet easy to use tool to create presentations.

As you can see, SoftMaker Office is not as complete as Microsoft Office (it lacks an email client like Outlook and a database utility like Access, to name a couple of examples). On the upside, SoftMaker Office is perfectly compatible with Office standard formats (DOC, XLS, PPT and more), it's also remarkably faster and, of course, a lot cheaper.

Despite its limitations, SoftMaker Office gives an overall impression of a professional office suite. It's the perfect package for netbooks – thanks to its low system requirements – and can also be installed on a USB pendrive so you can use it anywhere without leaving traces on the host computer.

If you'd like to try an alternative app to the almighty Microsoft suite, SoftMaker Office is a very good option. Just bear in mind that it's not that complete.