This is a neat, small and useful application if you often need to work with text files in different formats, or even just keep up with Microsoft's frequent and probably irritating changes in document formats without spending big bucks on new office suites.

The FREE TextMaker viewer opens, displays and prints documents in the following formats:. Docx,. Docm Microsoft Word 2007 and 2010. Sxw OpenOffice.org/StarOffice Text. Dotx,. Dotm Microsoft Word 2007 and 2010 templates. Rtf Rich Text Format. Doc Microsoft Word 6.0 up to Word 2010. Psw Pocket Word (Pocket PC). Dot Microsoft Word templates 6.0 up to 2010. Pwd Pocket Word (Handheld PC). Tmd TextMaker 6.0 up to 2010. Htm/html HTML documents. Odt OpenDocument Text. Txt Text files (DOS, Windows, Unicode, UTF-8)

And that's likely to cover every document reading and printing requirement of the average user, with the exception of the Adobe Acrobat PDF format which isn't strictly a word-processing document format. However, plenty of free PDF readers abound on the web already, the most well-known and recommended being Foxit Reader, and the Foxit range of paid products includes everything you need to read, create and print in the PDF format. Foxit is at http://www.foxitsoftware.com.

If you want to investigate the company which produces the free document viewer further, you'll find that the free viewer/printer is a loss-leader to promote SoftMaker Office, a full office suite for Windows, Windows portable and Linux which incorporates the same technology and which can be found at http://www.softmaker.com/english/of_en.htm. My review of that site may be found at:

http://www.sitejabber.com/reviews/www.softmaker.com