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Review: ThinkFree Office Suite Attracts Users -- And Google: Page 2 of 3

An Office Look-And-Feel
When ThinkFree says it's a Microsoft Office clone, it really means it. The look-and-feel of the three included apps will be very familiar to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint users -- so much so that the learning curve is nearly nonexistent. If you don't use many formatting commands, the Quick Edit mode offers a simpler feature set and less crowded interface. But the Power Edit mode gives you the full (or nearly full) MS Office treatment with drop-down menus, toolbars, icons, etc. (Be aware, however, that because ThinkFree uses a Java applet for this mode, you're going to have to wait several seconds for your document to load, especially the first time.)

What ThinkFree does is impressive. If you are, say, creating a word-processing document, you get formatting, headers, and footers, page breaks, rulers, auto shapes, different colors, bookmarks, formatting, drawing, etc. There are even additions such as a button that lets you create a quick PDF copy of your document.

This is not to say that if it's in Word it's in ThinkFree -- for example, there is no Track Changes (you can access past versions of your document, but you can't compare two versions). But the feature set is extensive -- and the same goes for the spreadsheet and the presentation applications.

Do You Want Social Networking With That?
These days, no online application is complete without some sort of sharing and/or social networking components, and ThinkFree pretty much runs the gamut. You can push a document to a blog or send it via e-mail. You can share documents with other ThinkFree users, assigning them either read-only or co-author privileges. You can interact with other members of your group via the Bulletin Board feature (which also includes the ability to share files -- ThinkFree allows you to store up to 1-Gbtye of data). And you can take part in ThinkFree's Doc Exchange, an area for free-flowing document swapping.

While ThinkFree is a free suite, there's also an enterprise Server Edition that includes administrative features for $30 annually. In addition, ThinkFree has instituted a system where you earn "points" (I earned 100 by signing up) which you can exchange for storage space, clip art, and other features "to be added in future releases."