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For some Mac users, the proverbial Holy Grail is a productivity software suite not made and sold by Microsoft, but which offers clickable file compatibility with MS Office applications, while supporting Office formatting.

There are a number of reasons to want to avoid using Microsoft software. One is a ideological. Microsoft’s corporate behavior is routinely atrocious, and its lust to command-and-control the IT world is a constant threat to computing and Web-surfing freedom. Latest prima facie the example of this is the proposed “Palladium” scheme to replace TCP/IP with something that Microsoft will own and license to PC manufacturers, software developers, and virtually the entire world. As colleague John Farr recently observed: “The point of all this is simple. It may actually make the Internet somewhat safer. But the real purpose of this stuff, I fear, is to take technology owned by nobody (TCP/IP) and replace it with technology owned by Redmond. That’s taking the Internet and turning it into MSN. Oh, and we’ll all have to buy new computers.”

Then there is cost. Microsoft productivity software is grossly expensive. Office retails for about $500 -- about the price of a good used G3 iMac. Then there are Microsoft’s licensing restrictions and plans to move to a subscription-based license model.

Any of these would be valid reasons to want to avoid using Microsoft Office, but unfortunately, the business world requires Office-compatibility. PC users have a good and free alternative in the form of Sun’s StarOffice productivity suite, but sun dropped plans for an in-house port of StarOffice to Mac OS X, and the Open Source project that picked up where Sun left off, OpenOffice, is still in the alpha, or early beta stages.

Apple’s own AppleWorks suite offers a degree of Office compatibility through filters, but not full file transparency. However, there is another alternative -- ThinkFree Office -- A Java-based suite of productivity applications that support both the Classic Mac OS and OS X, and which claims to offer file compatibility with Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint with its corresponding applications: ThinkFree Write; ThinkFree Calc; and ThinkFree Show.

ThinkFree Office was originally conceived as an Internet-based productivity suite that could be launched and run over the Web, with file storage on ThinkFree’s CyberDrive. It can still work that way, and ThinkFree applications can save files directly to the CyberDrive. There is also a ThinkFree Office Server Edition which can deliver the applications over a local area network.

However, ThinkFree Office has always also been downloadable to run locally on an individual computer’s hard drive for working offline, and ThinkFree has recently been moving more in that direction are offering their office suite on a shrinkwrapped CD.

The CD-ROM version of ThinkFree Office sells for a modest $49.95, or about 10 percent of what Microsoft charges for its Office suite, and ThinkFree includes a non-expiring software license and free download of the latest upgrade release., as well as a registration serial number that can be redeemed for a one-year subscription to ThinkFree’s Cyber Drive Plus service.

The CyberDrive Plus subscription allows the user to store, retrieve, and share files securely on the Internet or their personal CyberDrive. Subscribers are entitled to download the ThinkFree Office application software and updates to any computer as often as they like. CyberDrive allows ThinkFree users to access applications software and their files from any Internet-connected computer anywhere that uses the supported operating systems -- a great convenience when on the road.

The ThinkFree Folders file manager, which resembles Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, can transfer files back and forth between your local hard drive and the CyberDrive with a simple drag and drop. You can also work with the same files from, say, a PC at work and a Mac at home, or a PowerBook and a PC desktop -- a cross-platform advantage that transcends MS Office compatibility.

Because ThinkFree Office is written in Java, it is cross-platform flexible, and supports both the Mac system environments as well as Windows and Linux with a consistant user experience, although the interface appearance differs somewhat -- even between Mac Classic and OS X. Files saved in one platform version will open without filtering in another.

I’ve been checking out ThinkFree Write in both OS X and OS 9. Write is a high-end featured word processor for producing formatted documents and HTML pages.

Both the Classic and OS X versions are on the install CD, and I loaded up both onto my Pismo PowerBook under OS 9.1 and OS X 10.1.4 respectively. ThinkFree Office supports OS 8.6 and up with Mac runtime for Java installed, and the installation to OS 9.1 went quickly and slickly.

However, before I could get the OS X version to install, I had to download the Java 1.3.1 update 1 (about 21 MB). Mac OS X 10.1.3 or higher is required. A download link for the Java update is provided on the CD, and once it was installed, the ThinkFree Office installation went quickly and smoothly, using the standard, OS X-style installer.

Minimum of RAM specs are 64 MB for the Classic version and 128 MB for the OS X version.

When you start up Office, a taskbar window appears with buttons for selecting among the various program modules. The Classic version has a serviceable interface that looks a bit Windowsish, but ThinkFree Office for Mac OS X takes full advantage of Aqua user interface conventions, and is quite attractive. Also supported are the Mac OS X native open/save dialogue interface and OS X native spellchecker, so in the OS X version you get your choice of either the built in ThinkFree Office spellchecker or the OS X Services 1. You can select the one you want to use in the Preferences.

One interesting thing about the ThinkFree Office spellchecker (which works really well, incidentally) is that it highlights questionable words in your actual document text as you check, and the spellcheck dialog box will jump out of the way to another spot on the screen if it’s covering the highlighted word. There is also an autocorrect as you type feature.

As for the way it works, aside from appearance and the access to OS X Services in the X version, I found that the program works quite similarly in either Classic or X.

ThinkFree Write has plenty of word-processing features and formatting options. You can check out the available menu selections in the Appendix below.

You can save documents in MS Word, ThinkFree Office native, RTF, HTML, or plain text.

Documentation with the program is sketchy, limited to a PDF file contain basic instructions to get you up and running, and the program’s online help, which I found to be about average in its helpfulness. However, if you’re experienced with other high end word processors, the learning curve should not be too steep, and I found the menu selections quite intuitive.

I found a computer with MS Word for OS X installed and confirmed that ThinkFree Write Documents open fine in Word, and that Word documents do likewise in ThinkFree Write.

The program starts up reasonably quickly, although slower than Word, and new window or document opening is also a tad sluggish -- no doubt due to ThinkFree Office’s Java underpinnings. For all its cross-platform virtues, speed is not a Java long suit. However, once you have any new or existing document open, menus, commands, and functions work nicely and promptly.

Apple has thrown its weight behind Think Free Office, which is now sold by the Apple Store. At MacBusinessExpo in Portland Apple VP John Brandon reportedly touted ThinkFree Office as being “the answer to the MS piracy issues” in his keynote speech.

“Our Java implementation for Mac OS X offers developers the most powerful and flexible environment for creating robust, feature-rich applications,” said Ron Okamoto, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations. “ThinkFree Office fully leverages Mac OS X’s Java support to offer Mac users another great productivity solution.”

And this is a program that deserves support from the Mac user community as well-- not just as non-Microsoft diversification, but also because it’s a really good piece of software, especially for 50 bucks. And if we want third-party developers to continue producing applications for the Mac, we need to buy them, especially when they're a bargain.

David Strom of VARBusiness reports that ThinkFree has reaped the value of supporting OS X version, to the tune of increasing its sales somewhere around 10,000 units per month. Prior to adding OS X support, ThinkFree had been selling fewer than 1,000 Macintosh-based version copies per month.

I have concentrated almost exclusively on the Write module of ThinkFree Office here. I don’t have a lot of personal experience using spreadsheet or presentation programs, so a comparative evaluation is difficult. Calc seems to be a capable and function-rich spreadsheet program. I had one report from a reader who was not enchanted with the Show module compared with PowerPoint. I can’t say, personally. I’ve never used PowerPoint.

However, to comment generally, it would be quite remarkable if a suite of programs costing 10% of the price of Microsoft Office did not have some relative shortcomings performance-wise. The main office productivity application is the word processor, and ThinkFree Write is a more than decent one.

Word is a powerful and capable word processing engine and near desktop publishing application -- the undisputed King Kong of word processors. Personally, I don’t like it. It’s big and bloated and overbearing. Not to mention expensive and made by Microsoft.

My taste tends to quick, nimble, text editors for word-crunching, but I very rarely have need of producing formatted document for hard copy -- mostly just plain text and HTML. Think Free Write can handle both these categories, although I doubt that it will woo me away from my beloved Tex Edit Plus, which is excellent for the sort of semi-manual, customized HTML markup I prefer.

What I will use ThinkFree Office for his handling the inevitable Word documents that come my way as attachments and press releases, and for producing the occasional Word format document required for compatibility with PC users and Word-equipped Mac offices. If that’s the sort of thing you do every day, then you should check ThinkFree Office out.

I’m giving ThinkFree Write (Office) two Applelinks ratings -- one based on price/value, the other on performance.

Price/Value

Performance

For more information, visit:
http://www.thinkfree.com/
or
http://www.thinkfree.com/login/download_mac_osx.jsp

Appendix 1: ThinkFree Office Features

Appendix 2: Thinkfree Write Menus

Charles W. Moore

Cool Mac Gear