Buying Thinkfree Office for Mac OS X

I really wanted to like this product. ThinkFree Office Suite was going to be my ticket to a Microsoft-free environment when I switched over to the Macintosh platform a few months ago. It touts nearly complete compatibility with the three main MS Office apps: Word, Excel and PowerPoint. It's close, very close but in some ways woefully far.

Okay, if you are starting fresh with no history of documents created in the Microsoft programs, you'll be golden. You'll have full-featured versions of the Big Three that will do nearly everything you could hope for and save hundreds of dollars off the Microsoft price. If that's your situation, go for it. If yours is the more typical scenario of dozens or hundreds of files created in Word, Excel and Powerpoint -- plus the need to share files with others using the mainstream programs, think twice. Think more than twice.

The first inkling of trouble came when I needed to edit a Powerpoint presentation that I'd created for a client a couple of months before my switch-over to Mac. In ThinkFree Show. I could add the slides he wanted and import the edited graphics but when it came to the _simple_ task of editing the text, I was faced with a nightmare. When I put the cursor into the text box and began typing, the cursor was in the _wrong_ _place_. When I backspaced to try again, it erased the _wrong_ _characters_. I ended up cutting the text and editing it in another application, then pasting it back in. Worse, when my client went to edit some text himself in Powerpoint, he couldn't even get the cursor into the text box! The file was essentially trashed.

I went to the ThinkFree site and after a lot of searching around, found an email address to send my problem to. Weeks later, I have _still_ not heard anything. I called their contact phone number and left a message for technical support. I missed their return call and left a message in the voicemail of the fellow who called. Nothing further and it has been over two weeks now.

Today was the last straw. I needed to edit a document and send it out to a client right away. When I brought it up in ThinkFree Write, my letterhead was completely skewed in the header. I went in and tried to edit it and was again faced with the inability to change the text in text boxes. When I tried to move the mis-aligned cells of a table, they moved to random places on the page instead of where I'd released the mouse button. I ended up using Word (thankfully I have a copy of Windows with Office running under Parallels on my Mac).

At this point, I deeply regret having shelled out the $50 for ThinkFree Office Suite. It's better than nothing -- but just barely.
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