In an ideal world, you could create a Word or Excel document on your desktop PC, put it on your Pocket PC, edit and format it on the road, and then send it back to the office as a .DOC or .XLS file, with content and all formatting still intact.

Unfortunately, this is not how it works right now. Word Mobile, shipping with all Pocket PCs, is perhaps the biggest disappointment for mobile users: No headers or footers. No tables. No outliner. No on-the-fly spell-checking. Severely limited text formatting. No image support.

What about document conversion? As soon as you move a .DOC file to your mobile device, all features that Word Mobile cannot deal with are stripped and thrown away.

Excel Mobile doesnt fare much better: It supports just a quarter of the mathematical functions of Microsoft Excel and silently drops the rest when opening an Excel file. Carefully designed charts are reduced to pre-school drawings or thrown away completely. It does not support any drawing functions, AutoShapes or cell comments!

Now there is an alternative: In contrast to this "toy office", SoftMaker Office 2006 offers the full feature set of a modern office suite:

TextMaker: Multi-language spell-checker. Graphics and drawings in multiple formats. Footnotes and endnotes. Tables with built-in calculations. A full forms designer. "Track changes" and comments like in Word 2003. A full-fledged outliner. AutoText. And much, much more!

PlanMaker: More than 320 calculation functions. Goal seeker. Named ranges. Syntax highlighting. The powerful charting engine displays any chart created by Microsoft Excel. An AutoShapes-compatible drawing layer. And much, much more!

And most importantly: TextMaker and PlanMaker read and write seamlessly all Word and Excel files. You can take important documents with you and work on them without losing any formatting or content.

Imagine that: An office suite on your Pocket PC that works just like Microsoft Office on your desktop computer!