The productivity software market is a highly competitive place, packed with big names trying to erode the dominance of Microsoft Office, and so at first glance it's not immediately obvious why anyone should choose SoftMaker Office 2006 above anyone else. Give the program a chance, though, and everything will soon become clear.

SoftMaker Office 2006 isn't weighed down with extra features that you'll never use, for instance. You get a word processor (TextMaker), and a spreadsheet (PlanMaker), and there's nothing else to get in the way. The suite is unusually efficient, taking up a mere 35 MB on your hard drive. Both TextMaker and PlanMaker start up in a second or two, much faster than the competition, and happily run on everything from Windows 95 to Vista.

Learning the programs won't take long, either, as they bear a strong resemblance to Microsoft Word and Excel, only with less toolbar clutter. But don't think that simplicity means they're short on features. TextMaker has plenty of text formatting options, can work with complex nested tables, has a simple form designer and can run mail merges. And PlanMaker is crammed with mathematical functions, automatic and conditional formatting options, has an integrated charting module for producing attractive graphs, and more.

None of this would be much use if you couldn't share your work with friends and colleagues, but fortunately SoftMaker Office 2006 works very well with other applications. Not only does it happily read or write Microsoft Office documents in all formats up to Office 2003/ XP (even password-protected Word files), but the suite also reads OpenOffice SXW and OpenDocument ODT files for maximum compatibility with other suites.