As we discussed in an earlier Free Friday post that profiled the free bookkeeping capabilities of Nevitium Invoice Manager, simply because a certain program, application, or service is necessary to operate a business does not mean there is always room for its subsequent cost within a budget.

Even our web site design and SEO company began as a small operation that relied on cheap but efficacious administrative tools.

This is especially the case with smaller enterprises and start-ups and commonplace but costly programs like Microsoft Office.

Yet, owners and employees need to create and share documents, spreadsheets, and presentations like most everyone else, and now they can do this for free with SoftMaker Office 2008.

When SoftMaker Office 2010 was introduced as a commercial version, its developers made the earlier 2008 available for free download, which makes practical sense since older versions of programs typically bring in less and less money with time.

SoftMaker 2008 essentially gives you all the features of the three core applications of Microsoft Word, just with slightly different names and looks (TextMaker for Word, PlanMaker for Excel, and Presentations for PowerPoint).

In fact, many users who disliked Microsoft Office 2007’s Ribbon interface prefer TextMaker’s similarities to the layout of Word 2003.

Despite being its own discreet program, SoftMaker is fully compatible with earlier and current Microsoft Word and Excel files, and has earned praise for being faster than IBM Lotus Symphony, and InfoWorld deemed it superior overall to OpenOffice.org. The one drawback for some is that SoftMaker does not offer an alternative to Outlook, but there are numerous other free email platforms well-suited for enterprise use.

SoftMaker Office 2008 is available for both Windows and Linux. Not only is it free, it is very easy to obtain. Click to download and enter your name and email. You will instantly be sent a registration code that will grant you access to the program’s full version in perpetuity (in other words with no catches, business versus personal use conditions, or obligations to purchase anything).