Thinkfree Office

ThinkFree Office is a software suite which comprises several tools which can help you increase your performance and productivity at work, and at home. It helps you create professional presentations, spreadsheets and text documents with a minimal amount of effort.

The setup process does not pose any kind of issues, and it does not take very long. After finalizing it, you come face to face with a pretty simple and quite familiar GUI, as long as you have used another productivity suite in the past.

Nevertheless, it is quite well-organized and it allows all types of users to get around it without encountering issues, and packs comprehensive Help contents.

As stated above, this office suite comes bundled with three components, namely “Show” which helps you create presentations, “Calc” developed for complex calculations and “Write” so that you can easily create text documents.

In addition to that, you should know that a file manager is also included, which lets you easily upload items to a cloud storage solution provided by the developer. It allows you to use up to 1GB of space with no charge, yet you are required to create an account.

All aforementioned components are compatible with Microsoft Office documents, while it is also possible to save your projects directly as PDFs and send them to the printer.

Presentations can also be saved as JPG or PNG pictures, e-mailed as an attachment directly from the main window and exported to your iPod with the help of a wizard.

Aside from that, you can use a slide sorter, edit the master text style, add headers and footers, and insert items from a long list of built-in clip arts, from the hard drive (e.g. GIF, JPG, BMP, WMF, EMF, PNG, TIF, PICT etc.) or your Flickr account.

Movies, audio tracks, text boxes and tables can also be added to projects, while you can also customize the slide design, layout and background, animations and transitions.

When it comes to spreadsheets, they can be previewed in a new tab in your default web browser, while you can also e-mail them as attachments directly from the main window. It is possible to use charts, symbols, worksheets and comments, insert pictures and a large number of functions, format rows, columns and sheets, input a password in order to protect the resulted items and create restrictions.

Last but not least, the writer component comes bundled with all the usual options such as text formatting and arranging tools. You can also add bookmarks, references, tables, symbols and pictures, use a spell checker, customize autocorrect options, and bring up file properties and stats (e.g. number of pages, paragraphs, words etc.).

To conclude, ThinkFree Office is a pretty good contender for MS Office, although it does not come with as many components. It encloses a long list of features which can keep you busy for quite a while, and can be operated without putting a strain on the computer’s performance. The response time is good, and our tests did not reveal any errors or freezes.