

AbiWord vs. MS Word, For Now 511
Gsurface writes "If you have decided that it is time to kill MS Word, then it is time to look for an alternative. Flexbeta.net compares AbiWord, part of a larger project known as AbiSource, with MS Word and asks: is AbiWord a worthy MS Word replacement? Not to ruin the ending but according to the article the only draw back to AbiWord is that it currently does not feature a grammar checker, though a plug-in is in the works." (Also on this front, AbiWord's native Mac OS X version is labeled experimental, but seems to work very nicely.)
Sadly... (Score:5, Informative)
Haven't got any complaints with it as a standalone piece of software, I only tend to use about 2% of a word processor's features myself though.
Re:Sadly... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Sadly... (Score:4, Insightful)
This is a popular fallacy. But XML only says how the data is stored - it says absolutely nothing about what data is stored.
Consider how you might store a table layout in XML. There are literally thousands of ways you might go about it. The chances of you and someone else even choosing to store the same bits of information, let alone with a similar structure, are, frankly, pretty slim. So, no, it's not "easy as an XML transform". The only advantage of XML is that it makes it easier to read the data -- but the tricky part is interpreting it, and XML does nothing to help there.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Fancy stuff (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd also like to see the OO.org people (and others) and the abiword people decide on one text format. I dont know which one is superior, but Word's real advantage is the ubiquity of the
Re:Fancy stuff (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, that may be a slight exaggeration. I understand that for many versions of MSWind you can first install CygWin, and then install X Window, and then install KDE. And then you could install KWord. But the ONLY people who did that would be those *required* to have MSWind as the main OS on their computer. Everyone else would be happier running MSWind inside an emulator (VMWare?). And you've GOT to be a techie to put up with the proces
Re:Sadly... (Score:3, Interesting)
To clarify this, I tried on several machines of different speeds, all with the same results. Just open a new document and type gibberish on a single line and let it wrap. When you get near the end of a line, all the text starts to have a refresh issue. It's not a machine limitation because it's the same between 20
Not worth the time to read it, summary below... (Score:5, Interesting)
Once we move into the "Features" section I lose all interest in the comparison... It's apparent that the reviewer doesn't really have a clue how to use Word, take for example: Another great feature in AbiWord is the insert field option. The reviewer fails to mention that Word has many of the same features located under Insert->Date/Time. As far as an updated word counter... That shows in my toolbar (so far I have 120 words). If he was doing this to show what AbiWord can do that Word can do too I don't exactly think he chose the most important item to compare. Personally I would be more interested in a comparison of the quality of documents loaded from other versions. If AbiWord can load a Word97 and Word2000 document better than OfficeXP can then I would be impressed. That's just me though (I have a feeling this would be an important thing to look at for others as well).
The size of AbiWord is a big boost though. The author claims it's around 5MB. If that's true that's pretty good for what you get. I had tried to use AbiWord back in the day while futzing around trying to work on Linux in a Windows world but it failed to meet my needs. For those with small amounts of RAM or a complete need to be MSFT free this seems like a good alternative.
Overall the "review" was weak. I didn't see any points that would make me want to rush out and install AbiWord over any other word processing offering. He basically pointed out some quick things he stumbled upon and didn't do any real digging. Honestly, it's not worth the time spent clicking through the multiple pages.
Re:Not worth the time to read it, summary below... (Score:3, Interesting)
This is why Word is still the dominate WP. It's got at least a little bit of everything you need; if you're willing to live with some odd quirks, you can even use it to replace almost all of the rest of Office.
Re:Not worth the time to read it, summary below... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd call randomly corupting files and moving images around more than annoying quirks. The fact is, Word's only killer feature is 100% Word compatibility. Combine that with a monopoly, saturation advertising and restrictive licensing deals with OEMs and you have a WP that's hard to beat.
I'd call corrupting files more than a quirk, too. (Score:5, Interesting)
"I'd call randomly corrupting files and moving images around more than annoying quirks." Mod parent up! Exactly right.
Several people had told me about this, but I don't often use MS Word, so I have only recently seen it myself. I was working on an MS Word document, that someone else had started in Word, for about 4 hours. I saved the document frequently. Eventually I tried to save and got only an error message. MS Word would not open its own file, and would not open the backup. My work was lost, apparently.
I decided to try something I had heard about on Slashdot. I tried opening the trashed document in Open Office. No problem, it opened immediately. Then I saved the document in MS Word
Another story: Someone gave me an MS Excel spreadsheet. I opened it in Excel, but was unable to discover how to make the row and column headings stay visible when I scrolled to the right or down. The Excel help was no help.
I opened the Excel spreadsheet in OO. The OO help was clear about how to make headings stationary. I did what it said, and saved the file as an MS Excel file. Then I opened it in MS Excel, and it worked fine. Again, OO showed that it is a very useful MS Office tool.
Re:I'd call corrupting files more than a quirk, to (Score:5, Informative)
File -> Open
Click on corrupted file, click on pull down menu on the "Open" button, select "Open and Repair"
Re:I'd call corrupting files more than a quirk, to (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I'd call corrupting files more than a quirk, to (Score:4, Informative)
Because they opened the wrong file by mistake and that file isn't really in the format supported by the application opening it. This goes back to a principal in GUI design where the tool should never make an irreversible change that wasn't asked for by the user without first checking with the user. In this case, the user asked to read the file, not write the file. Yet, the tool needs to write the file in order to repair it.
Re:I'd call corrupting files more than a quirk, to (Score:4, Insightful)
And why have an option to even open and repair...shouldn't it just repair if it sees it corrupted automagically?
I left Word behind many many moons ago. I'm not looking back.
Re:I'd call corrupting files more than a quirk, to (Score:4, Interesting)
OpenOffice is frequently used at my last job, because I showed people how to use it to open Word and Excel files that Office couldn't. I also found that some graphics intensive Word Files eat up a lot more RAM in Office than in OpenOffice. We received a series of documents from a client. The client has pushed their 3GHz machines with 2 Gig of RAM to the limit creating the file, and we could NOT work with the resulting files in Word.
Then I opened the files in OpenOffice and Abiword, both of which were able to let us work with the files and do what we needed to do.
The formatting wasn't that complex, the issue was all the graphics used in the documents.
Word crapped out, and took 45 minutes to copy segments of text to the clipboard.
The other apps let us use the files easily, and made it possible to copy and paste text out of them. (The people who needed the files were loading the content into an Online Learning system.)
Abiword and OpenOffice are now standard installs for people in the content department, as well as on a couple machines in the Sales department. Not even Office XP's restore and recovery functions work as well.
Re:I'd call corrupting files more than a quirk, to (Score:3, Insightful)
If a newbie tries to do something in Word and OpenOffice, and he/she finds it easier in OpenOffice, isn't that a good thing?
Re:Not worth the time to read it, summary below... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Try oo 1.1.2 (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Not worth the time to read it, summary below... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Not worth the time to read it, summary below... (Score:5, Insightful)
which it DOES NOT HAVE.
Word 2003 is not 100% compatable with Word 97. word 2000 had trouble with word95 AND word97 files.
there are HUGE compatability problems between versions of Word that make the switch to Open Office look like tiny annoyances.
Microsoft intentionally does not want 100% compatability with previous version of the
Microsoft does not like nor want that.
Re:Not worth the time to read it, summary below... (Score:3, Interesting)
After two months flat-out coding, in the last week, most of the company upgraded to Office 2000 . My program just refused to run at all on 2000. I spent the last week trying to make it work, but nothing I did made any difference. I had to scrabble around for an older machine with 97 on it just to do a demonstration to proce I'd done any work at all.
Re:Not worth the time to read it, summary below... (Score:2)
I'd love to have someone verify the above, since the source I had for it became a 404 more than a year ago though.
Re:Not worth the time to read it, summary below... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yup. Like it or not, the reality is that Word is the standard in the realm of word processors. Now, you can grab the odd caveman who's never seen Word and teach them to use your word processor, but to really gain users, you're going to have to steal some market share from Word. You don't necessarily need to emulate all of Word's features and quirks to get those users, but they're probably going to want to be able to use their old documents.
We really don't know from the review how AbiWord handles this at all. It might do a great job or a terrible job; we just don't know. Honestly, I'd rather see a review from someone who is an experienced user of Word, even if they're less technical.
Re:Not worth the time to read it, summary below... (Score:4, Interesting)
Not if you work in a legal office. WordPerfect is the standard there.
Just thought you might like to know.
WordPerfect 5.1 (Score:3, Informative)
I don't think that's really as true anymore, though. At least, everyone I personally know in that industry has long since migrated to Word.
Word is not the standard, .DOC is (Score:3, Interesting)
We use Open Office 1.1.2, which does a great job in handling different versions of
OO 1.0 was not as good, but with this version, we have had no problem whatsoever when interchanging documents with other MS-only shops, including clients.
We thought about using terminal
Re:Not worth the time to read it, summary below... (Score:3, Insightful)
We really don't know from the review how AbiWord handles this at all. It might do a great job or a terrible job; we just don't know. Honestly, I'd rather see a review from someone who is an experienced user of Word, even if they're less technical.
Interesting that you should ask for that. I've been thinking about writing (another) "review" of StarOffice/OpenOffice compared to MS Office. I'm a manager at a large university, and I moved to a Linux desktop about 2 yrs ago. I get lots of Word/Excel/PPT doc
Re:Not worth the time to read it, summary below... (Score:2)
Re:Not worth the time to read it, summary below... (Score:5, Interesting)
You've hit upon a huge problem Word has, and acutally has had for quite some time --making the features disoverable.
As a previous poster said many people only use 2% of the features of a program like Microsoft Word. Which is to say they use it just ever so slightly different than they would use a typewriter. Just about nobody reads the help files on software, so although Word can probably do a half dozen different things they'd find useful, they may never discover those features. I can't count the number of times on some messageboard where someone has said, "I wish Word could do this," only to have me reply, "It can" and show them how.
So that leads to the obvious problems like you've found in this review. I use something like Open Office Writer or AbiWord and I immediately notice all the things they can't do that Word can. While someone who only uses 2% of the features of Word thinks it's a direct feature match up.
Re:Not worth the time to read it, summary below... (Score:3, Interesting)
Simply put, Word's too big.
A compound document architecture (like KParts) and a plug-in architecture (like JEdit) might provide some ways around this problem. I'm a bit conflicted about plug-ins modifying the user interface, because of support issues. However, if you are going to provide so many functions, most of which people never use, simplification is
Re:Not worth the time to read it, summary below... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not worth the time to read it, summary below... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Not worth the time to read it, summary below... (Score:2)
Jeremy
Re:Abiword size matters (Score:2)
Re:Not worth the time to read it, summary below... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Not worth the time to read it, summary below... (Score:3, Informative)
System Properties -> Advanced -> Start Up and Recovery -> Write Debug Information -> (none)
it does this in the space used by the swap file, so it needs to be turned off.
After that, you can turn off all swapping.
Re:Finding the memory usage (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Finding the memory usage (Score:4, Interesting)
It's nice. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:It's nice. (Score:3, Interesting)
Getting Rid of Word Perfect (Score:4, Interesting)
Our organization *really* wants to kill WP, but can't replace it with open office because there is no WP filter. Does the WP filter that comes with ABIWord work well?
Re:Getting Rid of Word Perfect (Score:2)
Re:Getting Rid of Word Perfect (Score:2, Interesting)
-Leigh
Re:Getting Rid of Word Perfect (Score:2, Funny)
alias ls='ls | grep -v *.wkb'
Would you like fries with that sir?
Re:Getting Rid of Word Perfect (Score:3, Interesting)
My solution has been to use wpd2sxw to convert them, which seems to work fine for most stuff (at the very least, I can figure out what the memo is about). Since most of the windows users here (everyone but me) complain about not being able to read the WPD files, I think I m
Re:Getting Rid of Word Perfect (Score:2)
Re:Getting Rid of Word Perfect (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Getting Rid of Word Perfect (Score:3, Informative)
Sounds good but article is a little light (Score:2)
No grammar checker doesn't sound bad (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:No grammar checker doesn't sound bad (Score:2, Insightful)
Unless you're running a 486SX with a 200MB HD that's got to be the stupidest requirement for a document editor I've ever heard of. Fuck the size! Fuck the memory footprint! Who cares? This is 2004. I've got half a terabyte of storage. I've got 2 gigs of memory. I can download a 100 meg file in under 5 minutes. You're not going to sell me on a document editor because it's small. lol.
As you are sooo rich... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:No grammar checker doesn't sound bad (Score:2)
AbiWord advantage (Score:3, Informative)
Re:AbiWord advantage (Score:2)
Also, I hate to support msft's abusive business practises.
Question to slashdot readers (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Question to slashdot readers (Score:2)
Re:Question to slashdot readers (Score:2)
If so, stick to Word.
Do you not need to move back to Word at all, but require tables, headings, indexes, and TOC?
Then go to OpenOffice.org
Use Abiword only if you just need a "rich text editor". I wouldn't even try to use it to write a dissertation.
Are grammer checkers that important? (Score:4, Funny)
Are grammar checkers that important? (Score:3, Interesting)
Not every "which" needs a comma, not every capitalized word needs to be de-capitalized, my bibliography doesn't need to form sentences...
Look at this sentence:
"The things that letter says speak volumes about how children need to feel about themselves."
Where is the error? Word tells me this is correct:
"The things that letter say speak volumes about how children need to feel about themselves."
Although two english professors say the first one
Re:Are grammar checkers that important? (Score:3, Insightful)
- Single 'that' when two would be clearer
- 'says' and 'speak' next to each other
- But basically: far too many words used
No wonder you pissed off Word.
If you were to rewrite it, I'd suggest:
"The letter says a great deal about how children should feel about themselves"
Fair Comparison? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Fair Comparison? (Score:2)
Re:Fair Comparison? (Score:2)
It is apples and oranges, but still a valid consideration...
What about outlines? (Score:5, Funny)
The result... nobody wins. Word comes closest, but I still spent so much time wrestling with the software that I just grabbed a piece of paper and got my work done in record time. (course it was way harder to email)
One big gripe I have... (Score:3, Interesting)
I spend most of my days writing for a living, and I need something that is fast . One of the reasons WordPerfect 5.1 is still one of my favourite program of all time is its sheer speed.
Up until then, I used Ted [nllgg.nl], which is a very nice little program, but I am more and more annoyed by its shortcomings (no 'undo'? I mean, come on!).
Anyway... I recently upgraded my machine to Slackware 10 [slackware.com], and I'll give Abiword another try.
Which is actually a good 'Ask Slashdot' question: what do you use for word processing and desktop publishing? Again, I need something fast and stable, with a reasonable feature set. Cute GUI and eye candy and even anti-aliased fonts are optional.
Re:One big gripe I have... (Score:4, Informative)
Latex [tug.org] and Lyx [lyx.org]
Mac OS X Native Versions (Score:2)
Re:Mac OS X Native Versions (Score:5, Informative)
True, but I'm a recent convert to NeoOffice/J [neooffice.org], frequently mentioned on here, which is a wrapped-version of OOo that does support native cut and paste, along with double-clickable documents from the Finder and vastly improved font-rendering.
That last point is worth stressing - I used OOo through X11 and working with imported spreadsheets was a pain due to the vast font differences. This is vastly improved in NeoOffice. In fact the issue is gone for me, but I'm not so rash as to say gone for everyone.
Cheers,
Ian
Good starting point (Score:5, Interesting)
To be able to use it cross platform is probably the best function, users tend to not like change. Get them used to a certain desktop/layout and if anything changes they don't know what to do with themselves, they need training in the new applications and functionality of them. If the basic word processing and other similar basic and necessary apps are able to stay constant, so to speak, it may give more encouragment to admins to start the bold plunge of rolling out more linux based systems.
Lack of grammar checker a problem? (Score:3, Interesting)
Grammar checkers should be banned until one can demonstrate the ability to parse English correctly in the general case. Hint: this has not yet been achieved even in high-tech research programs running on supercomputers, let alone in consumer products.
No grammar checker... who gives a F? (Score:2, Insightful)
BIG SIGH (Score:2, Funny)
However, I do stand by my initial assertion that the grammar checker is relatively useless for someone with a strong writing background and who regularly proofreads their work.
Re:BIG SIGH (Score:2, Offtopic)
They aren't kidding when they say 'news for nerds', are they?
Well, my experience (Score:3, Interesting)
Un-informed reviewer (Score:3, Insightful)
Ever heard of 'Fit to page' ?
Another great feature in AbiWord is the insert field option. Under the Insert tab you can choose to insert a field such as date and time. If you choose to insert time, you will actually insert a clock into your document as the screenshot below demonstrates.
Word has this too!
Abiword doesn't even have text boxes or math equation editors yet.
I would have loved to have this application around back when I was running Windows 98 on my Compaq Presario with 64MB of RAM
Want a small, fast, Word-compatible word processor?
Try Word 97. Or hell, even Works.
Fine for Win2k except 1 (Score:2, Interesting)
The need for a grammar checker (Score:5, Informative)
-insert lame jokes with really poor grammar here-
But seriously folks... Is a grammar checker really that important a feature? I find that in Word, I turn it off because it drives me crazy. For one thing it is often out and out wrong. It will suggest corrections where none should exist, and falter on the more finessed rules of grammar such as singular references to indefinite pronouns [llrx.com] or the subjunctive [englishclub.com]. Try typing "here be dragons" into Word and you'll see what I mean. If you're a pirate, Word is next to useless for noting up treasure maps, and that's just one of its many grammatical flaws for average users.
To me, these rules are the things that make English interesting and enjoyable. Products like the Word grammar checker just make people lazy and reduce the need to actually know the rules. Instead of making a computer do it we should take the time to learn the subtle details of our language. If you don't know the rules, not only will you struggle to express yourself but you will miss the details in other people's words. In this sense it's all a bit cyclic - the more our word processors fix our spelling and grammar for us, the more we devolve into a community of people with the linguistic skills of George Bush, totally dependent on pressing 'F7' to help us construct our sentences.
Or to forget the learned discussion and just quote the damn Simpsons like I was going to in the first place:
Lisa: Almost done. Just lay still.
Linguo: Lie still.
Lisa: I knew that. Just testing.
Linguo: Sentence fragment.
Lisa: 'Sentence fragment' is also a sentence fragment.
Linguo: Must conserve battery power... *switches himself off*
Re:The need for a grammar checker (Score:3, Interesting)
In my opinion, YES - in quite a number of environments a grammar checker is a vital feature of a word processor. I don't want to take ultimate control away from the user but I do want an optional feature to highlight syntactic structures which are not 'straight forward'.
To all the trolls who insist that a grammar checker is a crutch which will ultimately damage the user's literary skills, all I can do is recommend you try to read some hastily written factual documents from
Re:The need for a grammar checker (Score:4, Insightful)
Zealotry in action. If an open source program lacks a feature that many people agree is important, it's a "stupid, useless feature that no one uses." Once said open source program implements the feature, it's the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Re:The need for a grammar checker (Score:3, Funny)
Its all fine and well but... (Score:3, Funny)
Until Open Source alternatives can provide this level of functionality, MS Office and its components, will still dominate the market.
Re:Its all fine and well but... (Score:2)
1) AbiWord is opensource, by definition that means you are able to use and part of its code through any applications you write. Id go so far as to say that its Open Source nature makes it more functional and flexible in this area than M$ Office which is closed source.
2) AbiWord is just as interoperable between other Linux apps and distributions as M$ office is to Windows, in addition AbiWord is
What's worse? (Score:2)
That's a feature, not a bug! (Score:2)
Are you kidding? This is not a draw back, this is a selling point of high order. The Word grammar checker is worse than worthless. It creates more problems than it solves. It is so by the book that it cannot distinguish well-structured grammar from incorrect grammar at times. It offers suggestions that can be downright wrong. For every thing it catches correctly, it nags you with a dozen worthless suggestions.
I
That's an advantage (Score:2)
The only useful feature I've found in it is the "double word" finder. I do not need something telling me that it does like the use of passive case or even that it considers the word "postman" liable to cause offence!
OOo hasn't got one (yet) and when it does I will be turning as much of it off as possible
Another alternative... (Score:2)
It's free, small and runs quick (no bloat).
www.software602.com
The company has an interesting history, check that out too.
g3 (Score:2)
AbiWord is good (Score:5, Interesting)
But in every office I've been in, the app that keeps them locked into MS Office is Access.
I know there are a million and one scripting languages and database engines out there in the FOSS world. Anything available as a package that could drop in and replace Access? It would need to import it's data, make it as easy as possible to migrate it's VBA code and forms?
I've screwed around with mysql + various front ends (perl, tcl+tk, java), and it's not the same. End users need all the visual drag and drop kind of stuff, they don't want to touch code.
Access is no industrial-strength RDBMS, but it's a pretty decent for plenty of single-user data mangling, and of course the magical keyphrase is it's *easy to use*.
Doesn't matter how good AbiWord or OO.o get, until we can ditch Access, MS Office will reign in much of the business world.
No OASIS file format support (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I can understand hating IE and looking to repla (Score:5, Insightful)
If you already have Word/Office, then you shouldn't hate it. However, if you don't have it and can't afford it, then you may need an alternative. I personally can't afford MSOffice, so I go with OOo.
Re:I can understand hating IE and looking to repla (Score:3, Insightful)
It could happen.
Re:I can understand hating IE and looking to repla (Score:5, Interesting)
The output of Word usually looks horrible from a typographic point of view, at least in the default settings that most people seem to use. Some of the most obvious examples:
Re:I can understand hating IE and looking to repla (Score:3, Interesting)
Writing as someone who has been stuck writing large technical documents in Word I couldn't agree more.
Why most managers in most shops think a tool designed for secretaries writing memos is suitable for creating technical documents I will never know.
Worst -- we have standards for word documents. We must use yukky fonts, we must use headings that indent three tabs at each level leaving you with four inches of blank space and one inch of text.
Even worse -- we are supposed to colaberate with other department
Re:I can understand hating IE and looking to repla (Score:4, Interesting)
I've had similar experiences with Excel. I used MS Works at home to enter my students grades. I saved it as a few different flavors of Excel, none of which would display on the most recent version of Excel on the computers at school. Frustrating.
What's sad is that at my college, the computers are brand new and loaded with Word, Excel, Powerpoint, you name it --- Microsoft. And yet, the only use they are to me is to print out PDF's using the freely available Acrobat Reader. They can't even display a postscript file.
I no longer use MS products for work --- Not because I hate Bill Gates, not because MS is a convicted monopolist, not because I am a Linux zealot. I don't use them because they cannot do what I need them to do.
Re:That's no draw-back (Score:2)
Once upon a time I wrote something that referenced Notre Dame Cathedral, in Paris. Just for kicks, I ran it through the grammar checker. Out came: "Do not use "dame" except as a title of English nobility, as it is considered sexist."
I've not used a grammar checker since, except as a replacement for Comedy Central, as I have no television.
(I also went through the CTY thing -- my high score was math, so I wound up getting a math book. But, b
Re:That's no draw-back (Score:2)
You were saying?
Re:That's no draw-back (Score:2)
Anyway, you're right about the false positive's in spell checkers.
Re:Editors (Score:3, Interesting)
Men use vi.
Heroes use emacs.