SoftMaker Office 2010 is an interesting productivity suite that delivers much of the power of Microsoft Office, at a considerably lower price.

If you prefer your office suites to come without any price tag at all, though, you could always try the previous version, SoftMaker Office 2008. It includes a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation package and scripting tool, and is now available for free.

Opting for this edition of the program may cause a few problems. In particular, there’s no support for importing Office Open XML files, like DOCX, XLSX or PPTX, so you may not be able to view files created by a more up-to-date Office installation.

The suite can otherwise support all the document formats you’d expect, though. It’s compatible with older Office documents (DOC, XLS, PPT), OpenDocument text (ODT) and OpenOffice.org text (SXW), RTF, HTML, dBase (DBF) and others.

And the individual applications also have no shortage of features. The word processor is packed with formatting options, table functions, desktop publishing-type features, spell-checking and more.  The spreadsheet supports more than 330 arithmetic functions and can visualise your data in a range of attractive charts. The presentations tool is able to combine images, videos and sounds into a stylish multimedia slideshow, and all the tools can export their documents to PDF and other formats.

The lack of Office Open XML-compatibility could be a hassle, then. But if you simply need a suite for your own use, then SoftMaker Office 2008 may well provide everything you want. The free download is available now, although please note, the setup program will require a serial number, so you must register with SoftMaker before starting the installation process.