Thread: Thinkfree

Thinkfree started life as a budget office suite, but when we group-tested it back in 2004 it had a unique twist. Its Cyberdrive gave you 20MB of online storage for your files, free for the first year. Now in version 3, it has undergone several changes. For a start, the online storage has been upped to 1 GB, free, without a time limit, and with a maximum individual file size of 10MB. Second, Thinkfree offers a belt-and-braces approach. You can use the programs and store your documents online, and you can download Desktop Office and install it on your own computer Windows, Mac and Linux versions are available.

Thinkfree recommends you install the program on your home or work PC, as this speeds up working with long documents. Any documents created or altered while working offline are automatically synchronised with the online files when you next connect. So you could, for example, combine the speed and convenience of working offline at your desk, while being able to access your files from a computer anywhere in the world. If you are at your own PC you can upload files to your Thinkfree Office space or-even more simply- open files on your own PC then edit and save them online.

Thinkfree is written in Java, so not only will you need to have the latter installed, but to work online you'll fmd it needs to download code to the Java Virtual Machine on the host computer in order to run each module for the first time. The suite consists of Write, Calc, and Show, whose functions should be evident, plus Note.

As the screenshots above show, the interface is uncannily like pre-2007 Microsoft Office with similar menus and toolbars. File compatibility does extend to Office 2007,you-type underlines and autocorrect, but there's no grammar checking. You have most of the modem word processing comforts, such as formatting styles, fields, bookmarks, text boxes, tables and drawing tools. You don't get autotext or macros, but you can use all the fonts installed on your computer.

Calc, the spreadsheet, isn't going to challenge Excel for high-end number-crunching, but does provide tabbed worksheets, 70 chart types, autofill of series and over 300 functions. Show, again, is very like Powerpoint in look and feel unlike earlier versions it has the latter's three-way split showing slide thumbnails, the current slide and speaker's notes. The modestly named Note - in beta at the time of writing - is a dedicated blogging tool, with templates ranging from book reviews to lecture notes and the facility to post directly to a blog site.

Overall there are plenty of online resources such as clipart and templates, and a clever touch is the way the browser toolbar and menus are automatically hidden when editing. Another feature in beta at the time of writing was the Workspace. You can create projects consisting of up to 100MB of files to share with colleagues or friends, with various permission levels assigned to team members by the project owner. Members automatically receive an email when content is updated. We found that working online could be slow - particularly when opening large files - but this seems to be the norm for all online apps, and perhaps was made more noticeable by the contrast with the offline performance. Also, when working online, you can only open one file at a time in each of the applications, but this limitation doesn't apply to the offline version.