Is free-thinking the way to go?

ThinkFree Office is a new, online version of Microsoft Office which allows users to compose, share and edit documents online; but people ask, is it any good?

ThinkFree is designed for non-commercial use so that people can edit and create articles, spreadsheets and presentations online. The downside is that you do have a block of Google adverts down the side of your text, but for occasional use it does seem to be very useful. For those people who only need to edit office files from time to time, or from an internet café, or who wish to share their articles with others online. There are three options for dealing with a file online, view, Quick Edit which uses uses Ajax code and runs inside the web browser and Power Edit which is code written in Sun's Java. Quick Edit is quick to load, but not very powerful, whereas Power Edit takes longer as it downloads to your hard drive, but afterwards runs like any other program on your computer. When using Thinkfree for composing articles the word processor works much the same as Microsoft Word, albeit in a slightly watered-down version. Documents can then be saved as RTF, a Word document, PDF, XML and docx, the new format from Office 2007. However not all articles saved as docx have been proven to load successfully or reopening, but those saved as PDF do seem to work better. Spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations can also be edited online, but they do not view as well as they do on an authentic copy of Microsoft Office.

It is unclear what true purpose ThinkFree could serve, but for those who find themselves temporarily without Microsoft Office it does provide a service. The file open tool which allows users to load files from their hard drive and save them online, and open files from the website and save them to their hard drive, is a useful feature to have, as it means when you receive files that won’t read as a doc file, you can run them through ThinkFree Office and save them in a format that works.

Source:

Guardian