Ashampoo Office

The Ashampoo Office suite is made up of three components: Ashampoo TextMaker (word processor for working with text documents), Ashampoo PlanMaker (powerful tool for working with spreadsheets), and Ashampoo Presentations (handy application for creating presentations). You can think of Ashampoo Office as a cost-efficient alternative to Microsoft Office. And you can think of TextMaker, PlanMaker and Presentations as handy alternatives to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

The requirements for running Ashampoo Office are: 64Mb of RAM memory, about 104Mb of free disk space, IE6 or higher, Windows operating system (32 or 64-bit edition; XP, Vista, or 7). If your PC runs these Windows editions at a reasonable speed, it won’t have any problems running Ashampoo Office.

To get Ashampoo Office up and running you will have to complete the instructions presented onscreen by a setup wizard. Among other things, this wizard will ask you to get a trial key for a 30-day evaluation period, to pick one of several supported languages, and to choose between a Typical Installation (the most common program features), Custom Installation (choose which program features will be installed and where they will be installed), and a Complete installation (all program features will be installed).

I went for a Complete Installation and once the setup wizard was done, I noticed four new icons in the system tray. One was for launching the TextMaker word editor, one for launching the PlanMaker spreadsheets editor, and one for launching the Presentations application. The remaining two were for accessing a Thesaurus and for running Explorer.

From a visual and functional point of view, you should immediately feel at home with Ashampoo Office, especially if you used Microsoft Office, Openoffice.org. Apache OpenOffice, LibreOffice, or another similar application in the past. You’ll have no problems using Ashampoo Office to edit text documents, edit spreadsheets, and come up with interesting presentations.

As mentioned above, you can use Ashampoo Office for free for an evaluation period of 30 days.

The simple fact of the matter is that Ashampoo Office is a cost-efficient alternative to MS Office and a properly good, very useful productivity suite.