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AbiWord 1.0.1 Released
plam writes "After 3 years of hacking, the AbiWord team has unleashed AbiWord 1.0.1 upon the world. AbiWord is a Free cross-platform word processor which runs on Linux and Windows, MacOS X, QNX, FreeBSD, Solaris and others. AbiWord is small and compact (20 times smaller than OpenOffice!), yet contains most of the features found in larger word processors, including Word and WordPerfect import/export."
Actually three years to write a fully-flegded cross platform word processor is pretty good. I remember back in the .7 days it was still pretty kickass. I haven't tried it in a while, but it would certainly be nice to have some alternatives, especially ones that load as fast as AbiWord.
20 times smaller than OpenOffice!
Yeah, I tried to download it, and my up link was saturated for a good three hours.
I'm a high school student and I'm an advocate of open source software. I've installed AbiWord on several machines at school (which run Windows), and most of the people at school are happy with it. It opens most Word documents (at least ones they've come across), and the best part of it, is they don't even have to pay a single dime for Office to do word processing. :-)
This is superb, but what'd be really good is a spreadsheet that they could interuse. Perhaps, AbiSpread ?
Then again, what is an ABI ?
Even though people can argue about what software is better to work with, I can see a benefit in having multiple programs that do the same thing. In the case of using AbiWord vs. OpenOffice as a word processor, AbiWord would be great to use as your default viewer for word processor files in your web browser since it is quite a bit smaller and will launch very quickly. On the other hand, if you end up needing to do some hardcore editing and prefer OpenOffice, you can take the extra couple of seconds to launch OpenOffice if it is necessary. There is value in having a choice!
Unfortunately, I'm a University Student (one of those eternal students actually). That means I end up doing a lot of word processing, paper writing, and the like. And its not always in English either. At the same time, having a grammar checker on hand does make proof-reading my own papers much easier, for simple stuff like subject-verb agreement, and the use of active voice instead of passive voice. In my brief experiments with both OpenOffice and AbiWord, both lacked a grammar checker to do this.
Thus, I end up using MS Word for these things, not only because my professors only deal with MS Word format, but also because of the added feature of grammar checking. However, MS Word isn't exactly perfect in this respect. I do large amounts of my writing in the University computer labs, on their mass installs of MS Word, which only deal in English. Microsoft charges extra for increased language support in Word (last I checked it was a fairly sizable amount of money too). But I digress...
Unfortunately, its hard to break the MS Word strangle hold not only because of the file format being so nasty to deal with, but also the fact that MS has developed a very good and useful feature in its grammar checker.
First of all, the news is kind of old, as AbiWord 1.0.1 was put out more then a week ago. (April 29, 2002) Secondly, I would like to praise the AbiWord team. I use AbiWord for pretty much everything I need to formally write. It covers all the features most people use and I love how it loads so damn fast. (Six times faster the MS Word when I tested it.) I have some suggestions though in order of prority (if your not already working on it): - Grammar Check - Tables (sorry if I'm wrong and AbiWord does support tables) - Compile html files to a Windows standard help file Thank you for such a great piece of software!
I have on my hard drive at home a half-dozen documents that fall into the category of "standard Word documents", which is to say, they're the kind of documents you'd see on the "average" corporate network.
Even Word sometimes chokes and dies on them.
My point is, when I see "import Word documents", I can't help but think, "But what kind of Word documents?". I got burned too many times trying to convince my officemates to go away from MS and Office. Those documents are now a shrine for me: parse and display these, and you've won. Otherwise, don't even try to claim you can import Word.
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
"This will allow you to create simple tables. More sophisticated table support is the major feature planned for AbiWord 1.2. The developers already know that it is needed, and are already working on it."
troodon.net
Hasn't filed suit against them yet for "Copyright Infringement." I mean... they've got "Word" in their name! Doesn't anyone remember the "Lindows" debacle?
...not saying that either side is right, but there's always room for some more Microsoft bashing in this world.
Current Version: 1.0.1
.chm Help file.
Speed (10/10)
Website: http://www.abiword.com/
Licence: GNU General Public Licence
Operating System: Windows, Mac OS X, UNIX (including Linux), BeOS
Size: 4MB
Tested on: Windows 98
Major Propertary Competitors: Microsoft Word Screenshot: [N/A] Ease of Use Review:
Interface (9/10)
Suprise! Suprise! Anyone who ever used Microsoft Word before should have no problem using AbiWord, as the interface is modeled after it. Very easy to find formating functions and there are even the red lines under misspelled words. Help System (6/10)
While the help system is very detailed, it is not easy to navigate. Lack of a "search" feature is also a minus. It would be best if the authors of AbiWord compiled the HTML files into a single Windows
Jebus! This thing is fast! In the test, AbiWord loaded 6 times faster then Microsoft Word. It's lack of any bloat really gives it a advantage on Microsoft Word on both loading of the program, opening/saving documents, and running on lower end systems. Overall (8/10)
AbiWord is a great alternative to Microsoft Word for most uses. Most of the important features that exist in Microsoft Word exist in AbiWord, however I miss grammar check. It supports *.doc files well, and autoamticly ignores objects it doesn't know in the MS Word file.
I've been following AbiWord development for a while, and I'm still amazed by this little piece of software. I use it for all my small- and medium-sized documents (anything larger and I use LyX), and I love it.
One of the strong points of AbiWord is there's all sorts of nice "little things" features, such as the ability to import and export PalmDoc and PsionWord documents (I have both a PalmOS handheld and a Psion/EPOC/Symbian/whatever handheld). The lack of tables is a drag, but once that's added, I think this will truly be the perfect lightweight word processor. None of that useless bloat a la MS Office, just the features 99% of people need 99% of the time. Kudos to the AbiWord team.
Mozilla's a nice operating system, but it needs a better browser.
Actually, I use AbiWord now for all my Word translation. I get a lot of submissions that (according to our writer's guidelines) should be 'ordinary plain (ASCII) text', naturally people send Word DOC files or RTFs or PDFs (argh!)
:)
Anyway, AbiWord is the _only_ tool that's successfully opened up everything I've thrown at it. In particular, stuff from Mac Word tends to choke StarOffice and, oh, MS Word (gotta love that 'standard', as you note sometimes it can't handle its own stuff!)
And their 'automatic detection' kicks ass. I _hate_ the concept that I have to figure out which version of Word something was created in-- hello, isn't that the programs job?
My guess is the AbiWord people implemented good fallback/failsafe stuff, so that format trouble is 'guessed at and warned' rather than simple core dumped.
Given AbiWord, I've now weaned myself entirely off MS products (including Windows) for everything except my big dumb game box in the basement (ooh, Serious Sam II!)
MS should buy AbiWord and just replace their product with it
A.
No equations in the forseeable future. But, we're accepting patches. If you just send a patch to abiword-dev[AT]abisource.com, it will most likely be committed that day.
Tables and footnotes/endnotes will be in 1.2. We are overhauling the layout engine to support them.
Tables are nontrivial to implement correctly. Currently, if you really want tables, you can simulate them using tabs and over/underlining.
I started implementing endnotes[1] a while ago, but I got distracted by real life. They're not that hard, though, and once we have a new and more powerful layout engine, footnotes and endnotes should be fairly easy to implement.
[1] Footnotes go at the bottom of each page; endnotes go at the end of each section.
If it's true that AbiWord is 20 times smaller than OpenOffice and still provides comparable capabilities, those coders sure know what they are doing!
Keep in mind that OpenOffice has a lot more than AbiWord does, though...like a spreadsheet program, presentation program, etc. To say that AbiWord is 20x smaller than OpenOffice is misleading; it is, but this is because it is just a word processor and not a full-fledged office suite.
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
If the WordPerfect filters are decent, this is--for me, at least--huge. WordPerfect still has a strong presence in certain industries. Law is frequently mentioned but many academics are still using WordPerfect as well. Indeed, I keep a copy of WordPerfect 8 for Linux (the native version, not that crappy Wine port) on my machine for occassional file from my colleagues (as well as for a handful of my own files from my days of using WP).
I no longer have any need for Word thanks to OpenOffice; perhaps AbiWord will permit me to eliminate the last of my proprietary applications from my desktop.
This may or may not be a replacement for MS Word, but it certainly could be a replacement for winword. Opens almost instantly on my quasi-antique PII with a good feature set. It's won the right to sit on my HD for the right moment to come along and it's a shoe-in for my pentium laptop.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
abiword does not provide comparable capabilities. it's more of a lightweight editor. kate w/ font suppport maybe. i'd compare it more to wordpad than open office.
openoffice is definately a M$ Office alternative for general document handling, unless you've got a marketing department. those guys will create stuff that m$ office doesn't handle properly.
Abiword turns out to be a pretty good word processor. I plopped one of my roommates, who exclusivly had used Microsoft Windows up until this point, down infront of abiword a couple months ago. He was able to write a couple grad school application essays without any complaints, or without asking for any assistance. He even got his printer working without any assistance. That's quite a feat. I'm not sure you could plop a windows user down infront of a Mac and have them be able to to figure their way around so well.
Unfortunately, using abiword for my work is totally useless. While abiword has attacked the home market user, it hasn't paid much attention to the business user. By far the biggest piece of functionality abiword lacks is table support. I can't think of a single document (mostly technical I guess) I've had to write for work which did not somewhere in the document contain a table. Unfortunately abiword simply doesn't support tables, and trying to import a word document with tables, the tables just get flattened with linefeeds instead of cells. I'm not even sure how you could write a lab report using abiword without table support. Maybe you could make a table in gnumeric and paste in an image.
This is very unfortunate because everything else about abiword is quite spectacular. It is so much lighter weight then openoffice, and so much more of a pleasure to use, but, unfortunately, I'll have to continue using openoffice for a little whlie longer.
If I could program C or C++ worth a damn, I would definately do something about this! (That and allowing gnumeric to import a tab delimited file form the commandline). Alas, these Java hands of mine are useless! I feel like I should be able to help, and not just complain it. But I really can't. Maybe I can go bake the abiword people some cookies instead.
It worked well enough for me to do up an rtf resume with it, the only task I've wanted a word processor for so far.
:-)
AbiWord also lacks tables. Still a handy piece of software.
How many people use footnotes again? Not many office users. They aren't in yet, but they're coming.
May we never see th
Write letters and papers and documentation in a word processor, and code in an editor or development suite.
Again, sorry--but that was just a complete waste of a complaint. If I had mod points at the moment, I would mod you -1, silly.
Slashdot needs to interview Natalie Portman.
Nope. Just displays the source.
I have a Pent133 IBM 760E laptop (32meg RAM/1GB HDD) and to put MSOffice on here is horrible, believe me i tried.
Clocking in at 4.3 megs for the windows version, AbiWord is TINY! Upon installing it the license agreement came up:
"The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to share and change it. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software--to make sure the software is free for all its users"
I know most open source users find this run-of-the-mill, but i'm a stright up windows guy. Not only was reading the license enjoyable but it was very easy to read. (note to myself: why am I not running GNU software more often??*** see below)
Abiword is FAST FAST FAST. I've used Sun's OpenOffice a couple of times but I didn't really care for it all that much. Abiword's layout is clean and neat as well. I find it painfully distracting to see a billon icons on the top toolbar on some word processing apps. This is a plus for me at least.
I also like how AbiWord handles multiple instances of documents. A totally seperate window for each document. I use notepad for word processing (don't laugh!) so i'm used to this. From time to time i also use Word 2000 and I don't really care for the window behind a window layout of it at all.
Needless to say for 4.3 megs is a very efficient program that's fast, easy to use, and free.
---
*** - (any one know of a easy to use linux distro for an IBM pent 133 Thinkpad 760E 32meg ram/1gb hdd and a 3com etherlink III card?
i'd like to migrate and use X, my friend has it on his boxen and I like using it and I'd like to give it a spin, hardware specs allowing. I used caldara and corel but eh. It wasn't pretty, and i really don't know what i'm doing when it comes to getting under the hood. Any ideas, suggestions, anything are/is appreaciated!)
A Penny for my thoughts? Here's my two cents. I got ripped off!
From time to time i also use Word 2000 and I don't really care for the window behind a window layout of it at all.
Uh, whachoo talkin' 'bout, Willis? My copy of Word 2000 has a separate window for each document. Granted, each Window uses 14MB of RAM, but each document DOES have it's own window.
It's good that you're able to make a list of reasons to have tables and all, but I have to say that most of the time that people use tables in a word processor document, they would have been better using a spreadsheet.
at 13MB compared to the 4MB Linux version?
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
This Isn't Free Software For Windows... unless the download for the Windows source is just in an awkward spot where I can't find it. I found source downloads for FreeBSD, Linux, and MacOS X, but not Windows.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
H'mm
Table support is our most-requested-feature and our #1 priority for the next version. It's being worked on now.
It does support Word 2000 and XP but if you find a feature for those formats that is missing, file an RFE.
Yeah. It sucks. X fonts are a terrible mess. The whole sordid affair is documented in Abi bug 1030. We will use FreeType in the future, though, and I hope that this solves the problem.
/usr/share/AbiSuite/fonts. If you want to use system fonts, you need to symlink them from your system fonts directory to that directory and run mkfontdir/mkttfdir to create a fonts.dir in /usr/share/AbiSuite/fonts. Then it'll happily use your fonts.
By the way, AbiWord usually stores its fonts in
An OSX Xwindows version of OpenOffice is also available for download (as of like a few days ago) here
This and Abiword, once Aquified, will be a good first step towards some real competition for MS Word.
Has anyone used both Abiword and the OpenOffice word processor on OSX? How do they compare?
W
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Not only would I like to thank the AbiWord team for their incredible contribution to Free Software, I'd also like to thank them for being so nice. Working with friendly people is socially motivating. I look forward to continuing contributing any way I can (which up to now has been primarily trying to confirm bugs people report on AbiWord's Bugzilla). It's a pleasure working with you, thanks for the comaraderie.
Digital Citizen
It's a pretty nifty program. It did not correctly convert my word documents, but it still is a good word processor. Not everyone needs absolute compatibility with MS .DOC format. This is a great program for those that just want to do some simple word processing and do not want to spend any money for it. And as plus, you can save into many formats and you can use the same interface across different platforms.
Now all that needs to happen for free programs is to shake off that K-Mart feeling/image so that people will at least give them a serious try.
AbiWord has headers and footers, but no footnotes. I think that if you hit Ctrl-[ and Ctrl-] you get respectively the headers and footers, or you can use the edit menu.
This is a known bug.
MS Word does do a better job if i18n than us right now but, after tables and footnotes/endnotes, improving i18n is our next highest priority. We have a special metabug right now to track tricky multilinal problems.
Work is already underway to add Pango and FreeType support.
Even without them our Chinese support is very good, our Hebrew support is also very good (make sure you get the bidi-build), and our Arabic support should be good but I'm not sure how much testing it has received.
So try it out with all the languages you want and file some bug reports!
Then in the meantime you may want to check out LyX, which is built on top of TeX/LaTeX. It's not as slickly polished, but damn it's useful.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
A native OSX version is underway but we only have one developer doing almost all of this work along with the work he does on the other platforms.
We would really love some more Mac developers!
We know about this. Most users don't notice any problem. Some users have major problems. We acknowledge this and it's another one of our highest priorities for the next version.
The next version will use Pango and FreeType and, on *nix, probably client-side-fonts via xft.
I believe there are still some issues to get printing working properly with these newer *nix font solutions but we welcome any input.
Hub
The problem is that the X font system is pretty much useless for anything that involves sophisticated layout work. It has to be addressed at the root, either by the X consortium, or by someone creating an application-independent font system that makes fonts of all flavors available to X applications, bypassing X's font mechanism, to the printing filters, to whatever part of the system has to access fonts in some way. Keith Packard (great guy, really helps getting X out of the past with RENDER and the like) has designed a mechanism called fontconfig (I hope everybody at the GUADEC has listened to him), but I don't know exactly how powerful that is.
However, the current situation is a horrible mess and in my opinion also the biggest Linux usability hurdle of them all.
Last time I checked, Excel was waaaayyyyy bigger than Word and Outlook together, so probably that in OpenOffice the spreadsheet program is a BIG part of the package.
Just for the record, dpkg -i doesn't sort out anything, it's just complains if a dependency is missing.
From the manpage:
"(actually, checking is performed, but only warnings about conflicts are given, nothing else)"
The Windows version doesn't have this.
I wonder who these standards are written for.
Hub
Grammatik has also been sold independently as a stand-alone program.
Asking people not to use the functionality in the Gnome and KDE libraries is asking them to constantly reinvent the wheel, leading to code bloat and slower development.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Now if it could only moderate stuff I write before I post it to slashdot, then I could sell my high karma account on ebay :)
Maybe I should email them and see if they'll put that feature in. Maybe in 2.0 they'll have a "Save to Slashdot" menu option.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
And nobody complained about it since I always send it as a PDF.
Hub
AbiWord cannot do multiple columns. Open Office can.
AbiWord has self-destructive marketing, like a blue ant as a symbol. Open Office has professional marketing. Generally, over a period of years, poor marketing means poor development, because fewer average people are attracted. I'm not against AbiWord. However, it does not help anyone if the negative issues are hidden. It is best to talk about them openly.
AbiWord is a word processor. Open Office is one coordinated suite that handles your office document needs.
AbiWord has a notably clean-looking design. It would be excellent for someone who was learning computer use, or who had a computer with limited speed and resources.
AbiWord was unable to open any of my HTML documents. Open Office allows editing of HTML (but not completely like Macromedia's expensive Dreamweaver, which is WYSIWYG).
Why use a dictionary when WordNet have all the information you could ever ask for )including stuff like synonyms)?
Opinions stated are mine and do not reflect those of the Illuminati
But I'm not going to be using word processors in the future, ever again.
I have several hundred megabytes and several thousand files of documents written on WordStar, WordPerfect, Word 2, Word 6, Lotus (Wordpro?), Applix word and Brown Bag MindReader[1].
The documents are essentially useless to me now, the time investment I made in writing them has not paid off. I'll have to invest significantly more time and effort to make these documents usable.
Instead, I'm going to use bog standard vanilla HTML for all documents and letters in the future. That way, the time I invest in writing, articles, documentation and letters will not be wasted. I can use any HTML editor or text editor I wish and the documents will be viewable and printable from any web browser on any platform.
It would be nice if there were open standards like HTML for spreadsheets and vector graphics. I'm tired of word processors and office suites.
[1] BTW, this was a lovely DOS based word processor which guessed which word you were typing. Fantastic for technical documents using long technical terms.
Deleted
I assume it uses ghostscripts ps2pdf, so you might want to install ghostscript for windows.
Well, don't worry about that. We can get you back before you leave. (Dr. Who)
You can import a gnumeric document though to create a table. Remember, tables in Word are really just embedded Excel documents.
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
Maybe, but all the apostrophes are in the right places as far as I can tell, which marks it as being in the top 1% of all /. posts for punctuation/grammar/spelling correctness...
graspee
Its just a word processor, so sure its smaller then a simi-complete 'suite'(OO)...
Not judging if its bad or good.. just dont mislead
people by compairing apples to oranges..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Abiword has suited the needs of my highschool attending brother however for power users its lacking.
I find it doubtful that anyone who can write a line like that would ever have a use for footnotes, or cross-referencing. I've never needed footnotes, and I've never met anyone who has needed footnotes.
Three years later, I'm still mystified by the attention Abiword gets. It even gets press coverage.
It's not even a word processor by late-1980s standards. No table support! No floating footnotes! The column support doesn't seem to allow changing the number of columns midstream--it's all or nothing.
No merge functionality! (Oh, but there are two optional, unbundled scripting plugins you can theoretically write your own merge function with--except that there's no user-defined field support, either, so any merge fields in a document would be ad-hoc, unprotected, and would show up as spelling errors.)
Great, so it's "lightweight" and starts up quickly, and it's cross-platform. Yipee. But I remember in 1988 it was pretty fair to expect a graphical word processor--even on the Amiga and the C64--to support tables and footnotes, mail merging and real, multiple-layouts-per-page column support.
Don't get me wrong. It's nice of the Abiword team to put their time into writing software they obviously find and useful, and it is nice to see a solid, genuinely useful embeddable GTK+ richtext widget come out of this, but can we please stop mentioning it in the same breath as word processors?
Definitely Clippy was a major marketing failure. So was Microsoft Bob. Apparently Microsoft Bob was Bill Gate's wife's idea.
Clippy expresses something accurate about Microsoft's view of it's customers, however: Microsoft thinks it's customers are stupid children, not even smart children.
Even software that is given away free needs marketing, which is simply accurate communication between the software's authors and managers, and the intended users.
Bear in mind that these specifications are EXTREMELY complicated - you do need special tools for them, writing SVG files by hand is a major drag.
As far as I can tell, AbiWord still only has binaries available for MacOS X that require X11, and my attempts to compile it with Cocoa support (following the README file directions) have been abject failures. I'm interested in AbiWord, but I really want a Cocoa or Carbon binary, guys.
Alas, if you read that manual section on creating "tables", it turns out not to be table functionality at all.
It's just telling users how to make very basic table layouts by using tabs and the overline/underline styles.
Kind of like doing tables on a TRS-80 in 1982.
Bleh!
That's because NT already has many of the dynamically linked libraries that MS word uses already open. Because OpenOffice is cross-platform, it can't take advantage of Windows-only API's.
It's good to see all the open source office suites making leaps and bounds forward these days, but my personal bet is on KOffice. Huh? Yeah, I said KOffice. Considering how fast KOffice is moving with so little help, it's pretty clear that the codebase is clean, efficient and managable. Just recently, KOffice 1.2 beta1 was announced, bringing forth a new fully wysiwyg layout engine. With this in place, there is very little holding the suite back from quickly dominating the scene. IMO this will be further proof of C++ being the superior language for GUI design. Time will tell.
Once it's time to go final with the document, I'll open in Word to add all of the necessary bells and whistles. This process makes for faster reviews, because the people on the other end aren't spending all their time looking at non-content formatting issues, and when the content is completely locked down, I save a final RTF version for archiving.
The Word doc then gets created and sent out. I'm definitely going to have to check out AbiWord, but I'm with Colin - having a host of files in various proprietary formats really sucks. I just differ in my approach. RTF is quick and easy to work with, allows for pretty good initial formatting, and is a standard that won't go away any time soon.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
agreed. In my own defense, though, I never said I was a grammar guru. That's why I have a copy of Strunk and White. :) Just chalk this up to my hands typing faster than my brain thinks. Also, that whole rant stems from my upset that folks these days seem to want machines to do all the work for them. In some cases having a machine do the work for me is fine but, having an understanding of the fundamentals of how a thing works and why can be very useful. I'll end there and get my fork so I can resume eating my humble pie.
-
As you say, the new version does support columns. I must have been using an older version when I last reviewed it.
Ummmm... no you can't, and no they're not.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
AbiWord can use whatever fonts are in your system.
It does come with a few fonts that most documents tend to use but you can use the better ones on your system instead.
Good quality free fonts are still scarce and we don't know about making fonts - only about makind applications.
When I felt like doing some hacking I looked at both OpenOffice and AbiWord.
I didn't like that OpenOffice wasn't even attempting to support Mac.
OpenOffice code was very difficult to get into and there internationalization web pages didn't seem very helpful. Internationalization was the aspect I was most interested in with a word processor.
AbiWord code was very easy to get into and I had my first patch working the first day. Hacking AbiWord was very pleasurable and scratching my itches was very rewarding.
Oh and my German is terrible so I couldn't even read OpenOffice's comments ):
I will try to hack OpenOffice again some day though.
I think we'd accept a bug report that listed warnings that need to be fixed.
Please file a bug report.
I thought our CJK support was pretty good. We seem to some problems with Korean but we know our Chinese support is good because we have at least one Chinese developer and we get feedback from our Chinese users.
Most of us who work on the internationalization of AbiWord don't know any non-European languages very well. I try the CJK support and it seems okay to me but hey I'm only a gaijin (:
Please file some bug reports so we know what the problems are and can attempt to fix them!
Actually, I think Word 97 might have been the one that acted this way. I never really made any use of Word until it hit 2000. Before then, nearly every Microsoft application was single window multiple document. Now they either use multiple window multiple document or "web" style single window.