TheRaven64's Journal: Gnome Office +5 Funny

Abiword, Gnumeric and their DB friend have been branded as Gnome Office. This is the funniest thing I have read all week.

I like Abiword. It's exactly what a wordprocessor should be, i.e. an application for creating documents with more presentation information than content (for serious documents I use LaTeX).

Gnumeric also seems competent. I rarely use more functionality in a spreadsheet than the sum function, so Gnumeric is ample for my needs. Oh, appart from the fact that the printed output, the print preview and the print-to-postscript-file output don't even look similar. And the print-to-pdf creates files that Acrobat Reader 5 thinks are corrupt.

One of the key features in an office suite, is how well components interact with each other. Claris Works did this very well (I used version 1 on my 386. The entire suite was under 5MB). AppleWorks (Apple bought ClarisWorks) should be even better, and I will be able to test this when my new Mac arrives. Abiword doesn't even let you insert a Gnumeric spread-sheet. Not only that, but it can't competently open any of the formats Gnumeric can save. Without this functionality, there is no way you can claim that Abiword and Gnumeric are part of the same office suite. Good stand-alone applications, yes. An office suite, no.