ThinkFree Portable is a version of online office suite ThinkFree which runs off a USB pen. I received a U3 USB pen with ThinkFree loaded on it courtesy of FutureWorks (warning: audio starts on page load!).
The first thing I noticed after I inserted the drive was the fact that it in fact has two partitions. This may get annoying on certain computers which have difficulty allocating a single drive letter to flash drives – nevermind two!
When you first load it, you are taken to the U3 launchpad. Here you have the option to open ThinkFree Portable or other portable software such as Firefox for U3 and even Yahoo! Widget Engine U3! Once you open the software you are asked to provide licence information (a licence will cost you $50), choose your language (7 are available) and then choose if you wish to use smooth fonts or not.
ThinkFree Office Portable itself comprises of a word processor, Write; a spreadsheet application, Calc; and presentation software, Show.
ThinkFree Office Write
ThinkFree Office Write offers all the same basic features as Microsoft Word 2003 besides mail merge (probably as their isn’t a database application in the office suite) and boasts some extra features such as PDF saving. I am disappointed over the fact this doesn’t integrate with their online suite; I was expecting the ability to store my documents online.
The word processor is quite blatantly a clone though, for example it has a feature called AutoShapes! This is great if are used to Microsoft Word but need a portable office suite because it doesn’t involving getting used to much new. It also has features most desktop office suites have such as references and clip art.
The software allows you to save files in Office 97-2003 formats, RTFs, TXTs, SVG or PDF. Sadly, it doesn’t support OpenOffice or Office 2007 formats.
ThinkFree Office Calc:
I’m not going to lie to you. Spreadsheets have never been fun, in my opinion. Calc doesn’t make them any more fun but it isn’t any harder, or more boring, than any other spreadsheet application!
One of the most useful parts of a spreadsheet application is the ability to create charts. ThinkFree Office Calc offers as many, if not more, types of graphs as Office 2003!
ThinkFree Office Show:
ThinkFree Office Show is the suite’s presentation software. I can think of a number of reasons it’s especially useful to have a portable ‘PowerPoint’: imagine going to a conference where you are going to deliver a presentation and to find that they, in fact, don’t have PowerPoint!
It has enough features to create impressive presentations: slide designs, slide transitions and custom animation. Of course, the latter two are only useful for those who don’t understand the ‘keep it simple’ principle but instead understand the ‘full-of-horribly-bright-colours-and-lots-of-text-coming-on-letter-by-letter’ principle. There are a large amount of fairly uncommon slide designs, but you can import standard MS Office ones into it.
There are a few bugs in the suite. For example, when you open a window inside one ThinkFree app (such as the font box), you can’t use another app!
There are a few other suite-wide features I like are the MS Word-style ‘auto-recover’ which can be used if you pull your USB pen out half-way through writing a document and how it automatically starts the save as dialogue in the pen’s Documents folder.
Sadly, ThinkFree Portable is only Windows compatible so there’s no chance of you using it on a Linux or Mac computer.
The question is whether or not this software which could be best described as an Office clone is worth splashing $50 (for the licence alone!) on or whether you just wish to install OpenOffice.org Portable on your drive. It may be wise for you to give ThinkFree a free trial (via. U3’s shop) before you make your mind up, though.
I think the suite is based on Java, which I’m not a massive fan of for desktop applications because I feel software based on it, such as LimeWire, load slower than most other executables.
Tags: usb drive, portable apps, portable applications, productivity, software, thinkfree, thinkfree portable, u3
