Review: Ashampoo Office 2008 office software

We recently looked at Corel’s Wordperfect Office X4, one of the many challengers to Microsoft Office’s crown.

In common with many office suites, its downfall was its poor performance when opening heavily formatted Microsoft Word documents, as well as its high price.

Ashampoo Office 2008 is not only fairly priced at £40, it also made light work of opening the same complex Word document that stumped Corel’s £280 suite.

Occupying just 50MB of hard disk space and requiring only 64MB of memory to run, Ashampoo Office is extremely compact and lightweight. Not only do its word processing, spreadsheet and presentation programs all run at lightning speed, but they can also be installed on a USB memory key and can then be used on any PC without requiring installation. So, if you need to work at a hotel lobby computer or at an internet café, you can.

We were immediately pleased by the user-friendliness of all of the included applications. The colourful toolbars are clear and logical, providing quick access to the most commonly used functions. We particularly liked the simple but useful touches, such as the ability to load any of the Office programs from the toolbar, something Microsoft Office doesn't offer.

Word, Excel and Powerpoint users will have little difficulty familiarising themselves with the Ashampoo programs, as many operations are done in a similar way. For example, in the Textmaker word processor, double-clicking a text box calls up a properties window from which you can adjust its appearance and formatting. Handily, all the commonly used keyboard shortcuts are the same, too.

We were impressed that the suite's diminutive memory requirement doesn’t mean that the included programs are heavily cut-down feature-wise. Textmaker can export documents as PDF files and has an excellent spelling checker and thesaurus. It also has graphic-editing tools built-in. The look and feel are that of earlier versions of the Microsoft software, missing out the much-disliked ribbon interface from Office 2007.

Similarly, Ashampoo Presentations and Planmaker – the suite’s Powerpoint and Excel equivalents – are not laden with too many extra features. The former replaces numerous pre-designed presentation templates with slide themes that allow the user to apply preset animations to an existing creation. As with the rest of the suite, menus and toolbar icons are large and intuitive, so even users who have never used presentations or spreadsheet software before will find the programs easy to handle.

Ashampoo Office 2008 manages to combine user-friendliness, speed and stability in a reasonably priced package, making it is a genuinely feasible Microsoft Office alternative.

Vista compatible: Yes