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AbiWord vs. MS Word, For Now
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.)
...these things usually need to be able to work with Word formats and that's fine with AbiWord as long as you keep to text only. Start adding fancy lines and stuff in Word and view it with AbiWord, or vice versa, and things start to fall apart.
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.
According to the article AbiWord is better because of the larger icons as they are easier to distinguish. The smaller memory footprint which is ~6MB instead of what they claim is ~30MB for Word but which I claim is only ~17MB according to my tasklist).
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.
Word if from Microsoft.. and M$ is tha best software company in the world. Take and example... windows, IE.. need more?
Fucking a fat girl is like riding a scooter... it's fun 'til someone sees you.
Abiword is really a nice little word processor. Quite trim, nice looking GUI. Works as advertised. Much nicer than the WP part of OO.org. Also, while on the subject, gNumeric is much nicer than the spreadsheet part of OO.org.
TODO: Something witty here...
ReactOS is coming along very well now. It can run AbiWord for Win32.
Free Unix? Free Windows. http://www.reactos.com
I've been using OOo for 3 months now, and I think it's the best replacement.
One thing that Abiword has that Open Office doesn't is a Word Perfect Filter.
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?
More choices is good, especialy for a lightweight word processor. This article at least makes me want to look at this word processor, although I found the article itself a little light (no real criticisms, which I find peculiar because of the nature of word processors, which always have quirks/issues).
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
The download is 5MB. 5MB!!! This is what I want in a document editor.
Omnis amans amens
...but why am I supposed to hate Word? Seems a decent product and the sharepoint shared workspaces has turned out to be real popular with my users.
Tiny download, very fast load time, about 1/3 second for me on the first run.
While I was really successful converting my family away from MSIE to Firefox I wonder whether the migration from MS Word to AbiWord would be as problem-free either. For example my sisters used MS Word to write and format their disserations (whether this in itself is good or bad doesn't matter here; no, they won't use LaTeX). Would AbiWord be able to do all this stuff as well? Various headings, automatics index and TOC generation, various styles? I'd be very glad if you could help me with the decision whether I should start this conversion too! Thanks!
I don't have a problem with abiword not having a grammer checker, It's unpossible to add-in every function that everybody would want right off the bat there. It's not like I ever used those grammer check things anyways.
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
How about comparing AbiWord to MS Works, that's what most folks at least used to get on their OEM installation...
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
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)
... is that Abiword is slow on my machine, which is reasonably powered (Pentium III 800MHz, 384MB of RAM).
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, 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, 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.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
the only draw back [sic] to AbiWord is that it currently does not feature a grammar checker, though a plug-in is in the works.
My wetware grammar checker inform me that it's "drawback".
Compounds often change through time from two words, to hyphenated words, to a single word.
But most software grammar checkers are useless to anyone who knows how to write, producing all sorts of false positives and missing important things like subject-verb agreement or distinctions between nominative ("who") and accusative ("whom") cases.
Get yourself a copy of Strunk and White's The Elements of Style for fifteen bucks, and read it. It's actually a pretty engaging (and slim) volume; you'll enjoy reading it.
(I got mine free for taking the SAT when I was twelve and getting a high-ish (600+) on the Verbal section. Any other Slashdotters pass through Hopkins's CTY/OTID gauntlet?)
Learn why the way I made "Hopkins" into a possessive is actually correct, and try and memorize that "try and" should be "try to", and that unique does not take a qualifier, because there's only one of anything that's really unique.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
I dunno. What's the latest version of VI?
OO.o and Abiword both have "experimental" Mac OS X native versions. While you can run OO.o through X11, it doesn't support things like copy-paste from non-X11 applications, something everyone uses. I imagine that it won't be long until Apple uses some of the source for OO.o to create their own, iLife-compatible Office software that reads and writes MS file formats. They did it with KHTML (for Safari, my browser of choice), and if the folks who are making these fine products don't get cracking, they'll do it with their software as well.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
Are you sure there is no WP filter? I recall using at least a WP6.x filter in Office 97, but I think it needs to be installed from the Office CD. Was it removed?
The first and last time I used AbiWord was late last year - it really put me off (OK, I am taking into account that it was the version that came with Red Hat 7.2).
That said, it was buggy and not very user friendly - by putting it out like that, I won't go back.
I'll stick to Open Office thanks.
If Abiword is to take over M$ word, it is going to still need a lot of work, however it's good to see something that looks like it will continue to progress into something greater. It doesn't yet have that much functionality, but this is something that can be built upon as they develop.
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.
If at first you DON'T succeed, Skydiving is NOT for YOU!!
Abiword is in my experience a very fine product and up to doing the things I want it to do. I doubt, that it really has all the features MS Word has, but I also doubt that most people really need these features. I for one don't and am quite happy with abiword. (Though not to start a flame war, but I prefer kword).
The only thing that is freaking driving me nuts with abiword is the way it handles language settings in linux. The language of the program and most importantly of the spell checker is determined by environment variables. Now I'm using an English system but want to use a german spell checker most of the time. I can now happily select german but I can't save this setting!!!
If any of the abiword devs is reading this. I really appreciate your product but being able to independently save my language settings would be a dream come true.
Anyway to get back on topic, abiword may not be an alternative to MS Word for everyone or in every situation, but it can certainly be an alternative for a lot of people and for a lot of situations.
All grammar checkers do is irritate the literate by flagging false positives, while instilling a false sense of confidence in the illiterate, who proceed to perpetrate horrors on the defenceless English language -- and, should the error of their ways be pointed out, they then claim that they must be right, because the grammar checker said they were!
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.
The first thing I do after killing Clippy is disabling the grammar checker. The thing is such a piece of garbage... the last thing I need is for a computer to tell me how to write.
. SLASHDOT: Home of the vicious nerd.
I just got rid of the latest version of AbiWord for Open Office. I was trying to save a new file into a Word document format for a customer, and for whatever reason, the file would NOT be read by MS OFFICE (2000 or XP) no matter what the version I saved it as. I switched to Open Office and had no problems after. I'm not touting one or the other, just letting people know of my experiences (and most likely other's who are also experimenting switching their Office suite out).
Sig it.
Using UPX Abiword for Windows (Abiword.exe only and no other files like the spell checker) can be compressed and fit on a single floppy disk.
Try that with Microsoft Word
If I can't open powerpoint, excel and text documents from other applications in open/star-office...
Yeah, because OpenOffice is *still* trying to hammer out that text-file filter.
Give it a try with those Excel and PP files -- it's free, so just install it alongside MS Office and give it a whirl. Won't cost you a thing, and if you hate it, delete it.
At least put some effort into trolling.
Why not try OpenOffice? http://www.openoffice.org/
It is a solid applications suite, and offers a good replacement to MS Office, in my opinion.
"Your 'Gin n'tonic Futon Brain' sure makes you smart!"
"That's 'Positronic-photon Brain', you idiot!"
Another feature I found unique to AbiWord is when you restore the AbiWord application itself, make is smaller, the text within your document is minimized. If you look at the screenshots below, you will notice how the text is made smaller when the AbiWord window is restored. The first screenshot shows AbiWord maximized while the second screenshot shows AbiWord restored; notice how the text is minimized in the restored screenshot. This feature is useful because you don't have to scroll sideways to view the entire text. Also shown below is MS Word restored to show the differences between the two.
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.
I use AbiWord under Windows 2k and the only thing that disturbs me is the strange spacing of some texts (maybe depends on the type of font). Anyway it works fine for me.
Sig. under reconstruction.
The problem with grammar checkers is that they're only correct in certain contexts. This is the nature of language. The MS Word grammar checker is an attrocity. Turn that shit off.
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.
-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 or the subjunctive. 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*
Read Pynchon.
Until Open Source alternatives can provide this level of functionality, MS Office and its components, will still dominate the market.
But....does it have Clippy? (I jest)
Momma told me that sigs are for the devil
Yea yea... it should be "disable" and not "disabling". If it makes anyone feel any better next time I'm up all night drinking I'll be sure to proofread my posts before hitting the submit button. *smacks forehead*
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.
. SLASHDOT: Home of the vicious nerd.
Nice attempt at a cliched joke, but you are just misspelling stuff.
You should have written something like:
I ain't not having no problems with abiword going to be having no grammer checking. It's impossible, to add in, every function that everybody would want right off the bat there. Etc.
...but why am I supposed to hate Word? Seems a decent product and the sharepoint shared workspaces has turned out to be real popular with my users.
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.
Who said you had to hate it?
Just because there is an alternative doesn't mean you have to hate word.
I think some really good arguments for abiword are that it runs on all the operating systems I use and that is really a lot cheaper then word. Now what does that have to do with hating word?
You do realize this isn't an article about OpenOffice, right? You've got to be the densest fuck I've seen here in months.
Having no grammar checker or having a grammar checker that's wrong more than it's right?!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
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 know of no writer who uses it. It gets turned off immediately, just to save hassles. If Abiword does not have this feature, it's worth more!
I just get a warez copy of MS Office.
The grammar checker in Word is one of its most annoying 'features'. Perhaps my grammar is poor, perhaps Word is using US grammar styles which may differ from the rest of the planet or perhaps it's cr4p.
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.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
It must be Abiword for me and company's 1,600+ computers because I will NEVER use anything made by Micro$oft. MS products are garbage and Micro$oft is a big collection of liars, cheats, and thieves.
I have been installing software602's office package on friend and family's computers for quite some time now, and it works great.
It's free, small and runs quick (no bloat).
www.software602.com
The company has an interesting history, check that out too.
I love abiword - i was running one of the old blue g3's (350 mhz or so) and openoffice, the default word processor in YellowDog was taking 15-20 seconds to open, while abiword would open in 2 or 3, and had all the features needed.
Don't worry - its just stigmata. Pass me a napkin and don't you dare tell my mother.
You'll want to use HTML coupled with CSS then: li.level2 {list-style:lower-alpha} etc
care to lend me a hundred bucks or so? because down here, to get what you say you have, I have to spend 3 months of my (high-standards) salary.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Microsoft Word 5 for DOS fit on a single floppy, and still does pretty much everything I need a word processor to do.
I just get a warez copy of MS Office.
I did that for a while but I decided that I'd be much happier if I used free software and supported the open source community, if only in a small way.
And OO.o really isn't that bad either.
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.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Look, if THEY are getting a grammar checker than why can't OpenOffice.org use this also? I assume this is open source. Anyone know anything about this grammar checker?
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
So. What you want is a WORD PROCESSOR that can open powerpoint and excel documents? Which part of "Word Processor" didn't you get?
I mean... come on guys... I'm not a MS fan, but why all this trouble to eliminate everything they produce? Word is a good application, for all I can tell, and it gives me everything I need from a Word processor. I don't get it, it is a good tool, why make another one to do the same things? There have been many attempts to kill Word, none succeeded. So it's not working on Linux. So what? Linux has lots of word processors, and linux users prefer vi anyway :). And it's not too often that windows users need to exchange files with linux or mac users. Geez, some people can be mean :]
PS: Spell checking is good for non-native english speakers.
Try creating complicated/complex documents in Word. Use lots of style sheets, use images and frames and text boxes and layout-intensive stuff.
IE, try working in an office where work is done in Word that is typically meant to be done in Quark.
Soon, when you see a 50 page document bloat to over five megs on its own, you too shall loathe Word with your entire being.
The smaller memory footprint which is ~6MB instead of what they claim is ~30MB for Word but which I claim is only ~17MB according to my tasklist).
It's not so easy as that. The best way would be to delete everything and just install word. Actually that still wouldn't do it and I'll tell you while: Your common directory has much of what word depends on. My common (Microsoft shared) directory is 120 megs. How much of that does Word depend on? 10? 100? True, it is shared between other programs, so to get the impact that you feel divide the size of your common directory by the number of programs that use it. For me, only Excel and Word are installed so that's 60 megs each, just for the common directory. Now there might be a microsoft shared with no applications installed but I'm not in a position to check it out.
GoBe Productive, small, fast, and works under BeOS (oh, and Windows too)
AbiWord is nice is you run a non-MS platform, as AbiWord has been ported to everything but Amiga (as far as I know)
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
AbiWord is a nice program and it certainly has it's applications: Why use Word (or OO-Writer for that matter) when you don't need the features?
As an example, take a typical journalist: The formatting is done by other people, so all that is important is getting the content right. Office is overkill here.
But there are people who need more features, and AbiWord never was meant for them. "MS Word killer"? Come on, that's so hilarious it's almost funny.
The time will come when it's possible to kill MS Office in medium-sized businesses, and that is the day when the import and export-features of OO have matured to a degree where documents imported and exported have exactly the same (and by exactly I mean like EXACTLY) look that they had before.
That'd be the day ms office dies it's long and painful death.
Word has been a piece of shit since 6.0. That was, what, 1996? This late in the game, someone looking for a Word 'replacement' is just clueless.
My primary word processor is, and has been for a couple years now, OpenOffice Writer. It's got good enough Word compatibility that I've had no trouble exchanging files with dunces during that time, and with the extra advantage that I can save to PDF (I don't know, can Word do that too now?)
AbiWord, though, is a damn fine little word processor, and I find myself using occasionally, when I feel spunky. AbiWord is the equivalent of what Windows users call 'WordPad'. It's quick, it's convenient, you don't have to wait for it to start up but you still get more to work with than plain text. The only difference is that Abi's that fast without being crippled.
For a primary word processor on an old box or for someone who doesn't anything too layout-intensive, it simply can't be beat.
Art Schools Dietzilla
Personally, I think Office in general and Word in particular is the best product MS has ever produced. It does everything I want it too, lets me produce great looking documents, and in general works smoothly. I think that people's main beef with Word is the fact that it was produced by Microsoft.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
I'd love Abiword much more if it managed to do
*PageUp* properly at the top of the document.
On Win32 it didn't last time I checked.
Seems to have been a longggggg term bug.
As it is Abiword is a great way to fix lost
content when MS screws up major.
Artificial intelligence is the study of how to make real computers act like the ones in the movies.
...until all these alternatives can do everything M$ Office can do (namely PowerPoint, its the new Latin for scientists) and do it better and make it easier, this is all just pissing in the wind. Personally, I use OOo to do all my work, but it did take significant time to get used to how it does things. This initial diffuculty is what will really keep these products from taking over Office.
Remember, the reason so many people switched to Mozilla/FireFox/Opera a ways back was that they were just as easyt o use as IE from the beginning and that there was major news coverage of the security flaws in IE. Yeah, so Office can be hijacked by a macro in a Word document. I have yet to meet someone dumb enough (or just plain unlucky enough) to have succumbed to this.
Free really doesn't mean anything to the average user if its not mind-numbingly simple and familiar. Word has almost 20 years on most word processors (emacs, vi and brethern excluded). That's familiarity M$ takes to the bank every day.
To be slightly off-topic, I've used LaTeX before for various classes (best damn physics papers in the class), but it took a significant amount of effort to learn the quirks (namely man, info and google scrounging). LaTeX beats the pants off M$ for technical and scientific documents, but it never gets used due to its idiosyncrasies.
Infinity plus one!
i love abiword, but won't use it until it supports the OASIS file format. i'm tired of have .docs, .abws, .sxws, .kwds and no common program to read them. three of them are open standards, there's no reason word, abiword, kword, and OO.o shouldn't support abw and sxw and kwd. preferably, i'd say everything should support sxw (which i'm happy to see koffice doing), but that's just my pipe dream.
If you have to use a grammar checker, you shouldn't be writing in the first place, except as part of a remedial course on grammar.
Too many people rely on spelling checkers already to tell them how such and such words are to be spelled.
I use spelling checkers as the very last step of the writing process, to check for typographical errors that I might have missed while proofreading the hard copy.
(And from experience, proofreading on-screen is not as efficient -- so much for a paperless office.)
That being said, I have never tried any of the open source word processors, but I believe that if such an application is to take on MS Word and WordPerfect, it has to be able to convert documents to and from those formats flawlessly.
If it's less than flawless, people will stick with what they have. Heck, even MS Word and WordPerfect can't convert each other flawlessly, and people who work in organizations that have both apps have to have both installed on their machines to deal with every possible documents sent to them.
Which brings me to my pet peeve: any conversion will add tons of garbage formatting codes in the resulting converted document, and forces me to clean everything up by copypasting text in and out of Notepad (yes, we use Windows here, through no fault of my own).
IE, try working in an office where work is done in Word that is typically meant to be done in Quark.
After that, try using the end of a spoon to unscrew a Philips-head screw.
Next, try eating cake & ice cream with chopsticks.
File > Open
Set file type to HTML
Open an HTML file...viola
TODO: Something witty here...
So... because you use a program for something it's neither intended nor designed for... it sucks? If that's the case, Quark is a shitty word processor, Emacs is a horrible SVG editor, and Frozen Bubble is the worst fucking database I've ever seen.
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
How much have you donated to open source in the last year? Money or talent?
Sorry if this post becomes off-topic or too "ranting" but I've got to say it...
I'm not criticizing you, and I've been in the same boat. But the idea is not to support an Open Source package because it's open source... that comes off as zealotry. You should support Free Software because it's [better|faster|cheaper|easier|etc].
Face it - we live in a generally capitalist society and unless the open source product can compete, it won't succeed. Look at the slew of successful open source software out there - Firefox, Apache, PHP, MySQL - and you'll see that it's not impossible.
I would GLADY replace Word...but what would I do without Outlook?
No, seriously though. The altOffice (alternative office, duh) programs I've seen have all been wonderful..with a glaring lack of replacement for Outlook (which is pretty much the only reason we use MSOffice. Nothing for Windows (that's also free) has even come close to having Outlook's functionality. If it's not weird, unreliable directory structres (Firebird), it's a terrrible GUI (Pegasus) - yes, that matters, everyone else on the planet needs a program to look good. Not one alternative e-mail client for WIndows (Come ON already, Ximian) has meeting invites, journal, or Rules importing (very, VERY important) from Outlook itself.
Word I can live with out, Outlook I can't.
Abi Word is nice if you want to ditch some lesser word processor, or if your needs are very basic, but it seriously lacks a number of features I use daily (and Grammer checking isn't one of those, thats what Copy Editors are for). Version Tracking is essential. Also complete Word format acceptance is a fact of life.
That said OpenOffice.org covers all of these things, and does it wonderfully (sadly the exception is on Mac OS X).
Seems like the reviewer started out with some premise of glorifing Abi Word, and to be honest it's not even in the same league.
--- Nothing To See Here ---
Seriously though look at (MS) Word's grammar checker sometime.
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 is just fine. (The paper I pulled that from was for their class.)
The worst part is that you can't get the "ignore" fuction to work right. It only ignores it until you type something else in. Word doesn't recognize quotes either. If I quote someone, the grammar may just be wrong... get over it Microsoft.
Only good thing is that it recognizes extra spaces (that can't be seen during printing anyways) and other weird mistakes like "the the".
Get your Unix fortune now!
On a PowerBook G4 867 MHz, 640 MB RAM, running Mac OS X 10.3.5, AbiWord is useful only for viewing Word files. Typing is far too slow, with characters taking up to five seconds to appear. Once that's fixed, I won't bother to update OOo (ugly GUI, but typing is fast) anymore.
How much have you donated to open source in the last year? Money or talent?
I have actually donated about US$40 this year. I'd give more but that's about all I can afford to give. As for talent, I'm afraid I am lacking there (for now at least) but I hope to one day be able to help out at least a little.
"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.
Great so they managed to make it look like MS Word, and we have a wonderful set of screenshots to see AbiWord vis-a-vis MS Word comparison (which, incidentally, is the foremost argument for "killing MS Word" here).
But what about ease of use? Do the hotkeys work as it is? Can it also save in different formats like how word does? What about introducing tables in documents? Paragraph formatting? Print previews?
http://efil.blogspot.com/
Interesting list of posts. With the amount of grammer-nazis patrolling /. , I was surprised to see the amount of badly-written comments deriding the idea of a grammar-checker.
b3 4phr41d 0f my 4bov3-4v3r4g3 c0mpu73r kn0wI3dg3!
MadDwarf
I've tried Abiword a few times. It seems that the feature I need is always not there, even when there's a button or menu item for it. That's mostly what turns me off about it.
Now, between Word and OO.o, I will take OO.o. for what I consider the most important features of a document editor: the default settings make sense, and the formatting works right the first time. I have spent more time on Word screwing around with settings to get it to do what I want than I have actually writing. Even the default document settings must be fixed before you can do very much productive work. Undo often does an incomplete job of undo-ing, so often if the tweaks go awry, you must start fresh. Unsavory.
OpenOffice, OTOH, starts up with reasonable settings, and the formatting tools work correctly and are well-placed. Not that it's perfect. I very much miss grammar checking, and I find it odd that it doesn't have it. I wouldn't think it would be any harder than coding AI for chess games, and there are people who do that for fun. Also, the auto-complete functionality is counter-intuitive. That needs to be revamped. I usually must disable it in order to save my sanity. Far easier to spell-check at the end. Still, there's not too much that's broken about it. That's where my vote goes.
Drop me a line at:
Key ID: 0x54D1D809
...the only draw back to AbiWord is that it currently does not feature a grammar checker
The grammar checker in Word is worse than useless. It gets confused very easily so that you waste a lot of time trying to figure out why it's complaining about a perfectly good sentence.
Turn it off, there is a vastly superior grammar checker between your ears.
I was thinking of the latter rule, which from the 'Elements of Style' is:
"Exceptions are the possessives of ancient proper names in -es and -is, the possessive Jesus', and such forms as for conscience' sake, for righteousness' sake."
Nevertheless, I'm pretty confident that in English English leaving off the extra 's' for possessives of all names ending in 's' is the standard and correct approach.
Read Pynchon.
Hate is unproductive. Thus you need not to hate it but it would be good if you were aware of all the consequences of using Word or similarly licenced products. It is basically YOUR goods (data) closed in SOMEONE ELSE's lockbox (data format). To open the lockbox you have to pay SOMEONE ELSE only to get YOUR goods back. This may or may not be bad, depending on the point of view. You may also have a look for example here for some other explanations. If then, being fully aware of all the aspects you consciously choose that Word is your product of choice - YOUR (not SOMEONE ELSE's) will and choice.
Now, mod me down freely. My karma can't get any worse...
Get 'Fowler's Modern English Usage' and learn the native tongue, not 'American'. Please.
Read Pynchon.
Anyone know how WP stacks up to AbiWord?
"Ack. Yech. Barf. Snort." - Bill the Cat
1) If I have bold text, and then non-bold text a couple lines down and I remove the space in between, the non-bold text should NOT turn bold dammit!
2) If I press enter a whole lot to the next page, the paragraph I am moving down should NOT skip down the the middle of the next page for no damn reason (happens sporatically)
3) Autoformat only seems to do it's job when I don't want it do to.
4) Roman Numeral based hierarchical lists... word takes over and you can't do anything about it, to me best efforts anyways.
Exposure is also a way to donate. Show the world the benefits. And after a while you can help beginners. Beginners who started because of you. Who could become the architects of the next generation of Free Software.
It could happen.
Nobody believes the official spokesman, but everybody trusts an unidentified source. -- Ron Nesen
Next time you get a minor document corruption, that whatever you do, you can't get rid of it and you can't do anything with the actual physical data (because the format is secret), you might understand.
Personally ended up having to scan and fix a 50 page client specification in Office 97 because of this. And before you ask about the backup, that had the same problem in it.
I'm not saying that's why it sucks--I'm saying that trying to do advanced work will show you how bad it sucks. Because Word itself thinks its capable of doing things that its not capable of doing.
Believe me, if I had my druthers, I'd rather use the right tools for the right job.
Then try working in a setting where management tells you you have to do those things so you can share your lunch with your co-workers.
Yeah, things get ugly real fast...
Sounds like you are helping out plenty.
I switched to AbiWord more than a year and a half ago because word was too slow and it crashed a lot, sometimes destroying documents. AbiWord can edit tons of file types, including PalmDoc, which I use a lot on my PDA. It was very easy to switch, too, unlike the windows-linux migration I'm currently taking on (ergh..) I highly recommend AbiWord.
Although I am no fan of the MS Office System's large memory and storage footprint, I can give it a fair share of praise for all it can do...probably better than any office suite out there. I am using Word for writing my master's thesis (LateX ..I know) and its simply amazing.
I've managed to unlearn the wrong (bold/font/italics/enter for spaces in paragraphs) and re-learn the simple & accurate way of formatting a word document (Styles & Formatting) and it has never had any problems so far...not with images...not with tables...not with equations.
Many people know Word, only few know how to use it. (Help is st forward). Although I wish it would use PDF as standard format; just for the sake of compatibility !
I currently use MS Office '97. That serves the needs that I have. I have no reason whatsoever to upgrade to a more recent version of MS Office.
However, when/if MS Office '97 ceases to work in the operating environment I choose to use, then I'll more than likely switch over to OpenOffice.
There is no way I can justify the upgrade fees for MS Office anymore.
Well, I downloaded it just to see how it would cope opening various documents. It opened Word documents no problem, but choked badly when fed OpenOffice.org documents (.sxw) even though their site lists OpenOffice.org document support.
I'm sure they will get there, especially considering OOo's open document format, but for now it is not capable of being a true document agnostic replacement.
Visceral Psyche Films
Gee, I never embed charts, tables, or data in my word documents and set them to automatically refresh data when the source data changes. I keep separate documents for each, change the page numbers by hand when the memo changes length and so the chart's on a different page, and type my data in three places because my apps can't talk to each other.
I've got documents that import graphs from excel that are based on a combination of spreadsheet data and database information, where the database is an access mdb with some local data and some linked mysql tables. The user's enter their data once and the charts in my document just work.
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:
- No hyphenation. In technical texts, a long word will stretch the inter-word whitespace, or sometimes (even uglier), the intra-word whitespace.
- Breaking words on existing hyphens. Something like "an inter-word whitespace" will be broken on the hyphen. Exactly where it shouldn't since it renders it ambiguous whether the writer meant to write it as one word or as two words.
- Superscripts and subscripts will create an extra gap between that line containing them and the preceding or following line. That seems to be why PhD theses that contain chemical or mathematical formulas usually are typeset with linespace 1.5, which doesn't look good either.
- Mathematical equations look horrible. If you want them to look better, you'll have to buy an add-on package---the better ones are actually based on a TeX engine.
- Empty space is one of the most important ingredients in proper formatting. I don't know whether Word automatically formats section headers and figure captions in long document, or that people do it by hand, but the result sucks. Numbered or bulleted lists do not have extra white above and below in order to separate them from the text. Section headers have whitespace around them that is an integer multiple of the line spacing, which is usually too tight (no empty line) or too wide (one empty line).
As you might guess: I prefer LaTeX. The basics are not that hard; someone who's writing a PhD thesis should certainly be able to get used to it within an afternoon and with the default settings you'll get typographically good formatting. Of course, it requires more effort if you want to change the default settings, but that's typically something you've to figure out just once and then you can use those style settings for similar future documents.Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
I believe in giving alternatives to MS products a chance, however I've yet to find anything to replace Word.
For me, I gave up on AbiWord because of the Bullet-list/Outline or whatever you want to call it. Two problems: Shift-Tab doesn't move my heading to the left, and the default lists are trash, and I would need to create a custom one every time I start a new one.
I'm in law school, so basically, typing outlines is 50% of everything I do. I'd love to dump Word, but at this point, I can't.
I started using Star Office about 5 years ago. I use OpenOffice now, and I haven't looked back once.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
M$ doesn't mind this discussion: they'd like to kill MS Word, too.
Why? Because they just can't make enough money with it! Yep, that's right, they're shoveling in cash at the rate of a BILLION DOLLARS a month, but it's just not enough.
How could they possibly make more money? I'm glad you asked. Word is too much like a product that you buy and walk away with. Oh, they make you click on something that says otherwise, but the payment stream is where the action is. You pay for it, then you don't come back to pay more unless you have to because they got the CEO to upgrade to a version that's incompatible with everyone else, or whatever they can pull out of their "asshole of coercion."
M$ will not rest until they've converted you to a source of monthly revenue, like phone or cable. Whether via XBox or IE, they will find a way to tax your word processing on a monthly basis. So, go ahead, kill Word. Who cares? What matters is that you continue to pay M$ for the privilege of doing something you could technically do for free!
Abiword doesn't even have text boxes or math equation editors yet.
No text boxes? That's odd, considering there are at least 7 textbox bugs fixed in 2.1.6.
As for math equation editors, the functionality does not exist yet. However, work has been ongoing to integrate gtkmathview with Abi since Guadec 2004. Look for it in Abi 2.3 or 2.4.
WYSINotalwaysWYG
So, your saying that in a capitalist society everything other than (unemotional, short-term) self-interest in not allowed?
That sounds like Ayn Rand's philosophy.
Scribus impresses me, so this is a note from a fan who dabbles in it; I can't compare it deeply to state-of-the-art DTP programs.
;)) with every release. They just had a major release, too, and the documentation is far better than most software's documentation in the source-secret or open-source worlds.
;)
...)
If AbiWord is slow on your machine, then I think Scribus would be, too. However, it's a very nice application which gets better (well, that is the intent, I realize
Is it Indesign / Quark? No, but it's also a gifthorse
Right now, Scribus is more like PageMaker of a few years ago, frankly, but OTOH, can directly create PDFs and do other things which (when I last touched PageMaker, quite a while ago) PageMaker could not.
(Also, though my DTP experience is several years old now, I actually preferred PageMaker for small things; Quark I was eventually won over to, but for small things PM is just more familiar and simple to work with. YMMV
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
"Its clear that you've no idea how to use MS Word . . ." and it's clear that MS Word randomly corrupts its own files and needs OOo Writer to fix MS Word's own files for it.....
Which version of .doc has your office standardized on? I have next-to-no experience with MS Word, but from what I've heard every release tweaks .doc a little.
.doc format, they just have the golden source code. While the source IS the ultimate reference, for something that purports to be a Standard, there SHOULD be a document that is the ultimate reference, and code should be considered broken if it doesn't follow the standard. By the same token, if there are significant 'implementation dependent' issues, perhaps the documentation is broken, and needs to nail things down better. Can someone from MS cloak and answer?
I've also heard (much less reliably) that even Microsoft doesn't have a good document of the
As for me, I use AbiWord. I'm one of those cavemen elsewhere referred to, with little experience and use of word processors. I like AbiWord because it's simple and discoverable. I've done a little with Star/Open Office, but it's harder to do something simple with them, and what little I've seen of MS Word suggests the same.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Only "draw back"? How about its My First Wordprocessor interface?
You want to know who isn't running Firefox 2.x? They spell it "definately" and "rediculous".
I agree that it takes a bit of learning to figure out how to use Word as it should be used (kind of like learning how to write proper HTML). But the parent specifically stated that he hasn't really used Word before. That was his entire point.
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?
WeRelate.org - wiki-based genealogy
If people were only sharing documents in printed form, Word would be fairly easy to replace. Unfortunately people are generally sharing documents in the native file format of their word processor, which mostly happens to be Word, in which case most of the time you are better of simply using Word. Word is buggy and hard to use but I have to use it if I want to see the documents the way the author intended.
PDF as a format is awesome and seems to be gaining ground, which gives me hope that it will become the defacto standard for document sharing. Then maybe we can finally put stake in the Word monster.
Having Word fix corrupted Word documents
File -> Open
Click on corrupted file, click on pull down menu on the "Open" button, select "Open and Repair"
Rules change based on common usage. Get over it.
Word couldn't be the standard, for example, in the place I work for, because it doesn't run on SuSE or Slackware, and we just have a win 2000 as a print server (location issues).
.DOCs, a much better job that most versions of Word I have met.
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 services, and installing MS Office in the print server, should any compatibility issue occur, but the MS Office 2000 CD sits unused, because noone has needed it yet. We killed our last Win machine about the time we installed Open Office 1.1.
It is kind of hardware heavy, but that's not problem for us, many of us program Java, so we have memory to spare.
The ones who just use OO, don't have trouble either.
Heavier would be to have to dual boot Windows, or put money in licenses instead of fast hardware.
Maybe you want to use Linux on your desktop or maybe you don't have the $1000AUD it cost in oz.
(unless you're telstra and have a Linux pilot you can show you're MS reps.)
Or maybe you'll try AbiWord-2.2 and decide that there is really are better ways of doing word processing.
I'd like to see more fancy stuff. A simple grammar checker would be very nice. The MS one overextends and is very stylistic to say the least. Catching simple grammar errors (hey proofreading on a computer screen sucks) would be a step in the right direction.
.doc format.
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
It is much better as far as .DOC compatibility goes. I am yet to find compatibility issues.
Maybe a serious report of OO 1.1.2 compatibility would be nice.
The last I used AbiWord was in the fall of 2001. Back then, AbiWord's near-hourly crashes made Word seem a beacon of stability. Once I recall selecting all the text in a document and trying to change the font. CPU load shot up to 99% while the highlighted text flashed, and out of curiosity I let the system go at it for about 24 hours. In all that time AbiWord still wasn't able to change the font. Not exactly a viable alternative if you ask me (I've been using Office 97 since time immemorial -- also known as 1997). Given the number of glitches that many of the open source office offerings have with stability and even more fundamental things like files not losing formating between saves, I'd say MS has at least a few years more of dominance.
This program does the minimal wordprocessing tasks I use and more. It's also free, loads word files and more.s iness.h tml
602 PC Suite
http://www.software602.com/products/pcs/bu
So is the measure of something's worth simply in how close to zero cost it is or how little memory it takes?
A lovely open source project. Is it clearly better than its open source competitors? No. Is it better than its closed source competitors? No. Does one need to have need of a small memory footprint? No (1 Gb RAM/80 GB HD my current set up of the past 2 yrs).
The only thing to admire is the tenacity with which the developers continue to support and improve on the product. That kind of work ethic is always nice to see.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
LaTeX!!!
Not that this is an article about openoffice, but I haven't found a powerpoint, excel, or text document it can't open yet.
The lack of this dangerous tool can hardly be construed as a serious defect.
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 departments who have a diffenrent version of word. I have struggled for hours to get a document looking sensible with the text next to the correct image, no tables/list spilt on page breaks. No chapter heading at the bottom of a page etc. Then some **** goes and changes the default font and complains about the appearance.
You are not " supposed to hate word", thats up to you, but I certainly do.
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
My boss writes/edits NIH grants using their mandatory DOC templates. He runs MacOSX+MacMsOffice (I don't know what version exactly), but he is constantly having problems with the way MacMSOffice handles all images/formating from the NIH (presumably created in Windows MsOffice) in "meta" mode that is it creates "metaobjects" for all drawings and pictures. Sometimes formatting doesn't show up like it does on the Windows version and drawings are all garbled. I often take the template and save it in Word DOC format using StarOffice v6 or the latest OOo and then give it back to him (I think he's too scared to use *nix, even when it's just a point and click gui.) This seems to fix most of the visibility errors when he reloads it on his Mac, but some of the formatting is still messed up (e.g. text won't wrap around images). IMHO, why not just take MSWord out of the equation all together.
Can it match Word's Track Changes / reviewing facility? I had a quick look on their website and it looks like the answer is no. Can OpenOffice do this? I think the answer is also no.
In the business world the collaboration features of MS Office are what set it apart from the open source office suites. So, if the open source office suites want to make real headway then this is certainly one of the most important features to add.
Word will never be replaced because it is the Emacs of the Windows world. People abuse it to do everything from designing birthday cards to writing books and designing web pages and Microsoft designed it to accomedate this. This is why it is hard to get rid of. People joke about the Emacs operating system...most people use Word in some way for everything they do instead of a more domain specific tool. The end result is a program that is usable by 12 year olds for designing their canned web pages and writing their school papers but is unwieldly for any kind of professional use.
What a bizarre way to do it - why would the user ever want to *not* repair the file when they try to open it?
In case you're not aware, AbiWord needs developers, specifically for Windows. If you can't code, you can always download 2.1.6 and report any bugs you find. :)
Here are things that haven't been touched by any comments:
Current Features:
One of AbiWord's features that wasn't mentioned in the article and hasn't been mentioned in any comments is its ability to do command line operations. You can print, convert, and perform mail merges with a simple command, allowing for automatic actions. As far as I know, you can't perform command line operations with Word. Secondly, its size is an advantage for people running slower computers; _you_ may have a P4 computer, but somebody in Spain, for example, may not; this small size, combined with numerous translations and support for bidirectional text, allows AbiWord to be used in many locales.
Future Features:
In the upcoming 2.2 release, AbiWord will support native revisions and textboxes. It will also be able to import them from Word documents. Additionally, Table Of Content support has been added, text wrapping around textboxes (images may also be supported), and sum a row/column fields. Tentatively, math support is planned for 2.4. And perhaps more importantly, hundreds of bugs have been fixed since 2.0 (including quite a lot of dataloss and crash bugs).
Shortcomings:
Although AbiWord has numerous plugins, many are under developed. AbiWord also crashes a lot - there have been many crash fixes since 2.0, however it is not rock solid. Additionally, AbiWord could always use help, if you're interested, join the #abiword channel on gimpnet and ask how you can contribute.
Summary:
With that said, AbiWord is not a suitable replacement for "heavy" Word users at this time; I should know, I use it almost daily and realize its shortcomings. However, if OpenOffice.org is too big for your tastes and you only need a word processor with many features packed into a small package, use AbiWord. Also, if you need a program to perform automatic conversions (e.g. from wpd to rtf) or if you need a program to type the occasional paper/memo/letter, you should give it a try.
I *really* liked 1.x, that came up in 8 seconds flat on a 233MHz w/ 192M RAM.
Then I tried to upgrade to AbiWord 2.
1) the *required* aspell upgrade *broke* Apache
2) trying to install an rpm on RH9 wants package
after package upgrade. The 1.x was no problem.
On the *other* hand, OpenOffice.dog runs...like a dog. I see no real speed difference between my old 250MHz, my 500MHz laptop, and my new-to-me 950MHz system: 30 seconds to come up, and three-quarters of a minute more to get to a new text document.
Remember I said AbiWord got there in *8* seconds?
Maybe I should just blow them *all* off, and run my copy of WordPerfect 6 for DOS under XDOS....
mark
I think what the parent is trying to point out is, Word, AbiWord, OOo all have capable word processing capabilty, and in its core function, performs well (lets not get into file formats yet).
What Word does is try to justify its extra cost, by introducing specialist compositing features, that take word beyond its core functionality of a word processor, into realms of other software.
The problem appears that these "extra features" appear to be quirky, and unreliable in nature, and as such are often not used anyway, even when the user is aware of the existance.
Therefore, what are you spending the extra money on, if the features promised by the extra cash doesnt work?
Have a nice day!
I have to imagine that when it comes down to a Has Feature X mega table showdown, that Word can win against most comers.
Features have different value to different customers. And it's hard to convince customers, even if they only use 20% of the features of Word, that they could get 98% of the functionality in a competing product that costs less or zero.
If Word doesn't cost too much - and it doesn't if the company is buying it for you or if you're using a pirated copy - then why not just choose a feature-overloaded word processor just in case you need it someday?
Word is invulnerable on a creature feature comparison test. And it rules when it comes to inertia, what secretaries are taught to use, and that the last 10 years of corporate strategic planning documents are encased in that format and it must be accessible.
Word's only and small vulnerabilities are
- cost,
- cross-platform, cross-version, cross-application interoperabilty.
And MS could fix those if they wanted to; they're just there to encourage migration toward the latest version and toward using other MS products, also of the latest version."Provided by the management for your protection."
It definitely used to be. I did a little temping in legal offices way back in the day and they were all WordPerfect, which was fortunate because that's what I knew.
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.
When I say standard, I mean in a broader sense.
A majority of people in the world who do word processing use Word. Thus, Word is the standard.
I'm glad OO works great for your company, but it doesn't change what the rest of the world is doing.
Mabie theve improved things, but the font rendering was horrid and it completely failed to work properly with an international dictionary defaulting to American every time I open a document.
Not had any problem with open office, and the support for MS documents is much better.
I don't have financial issues by myself ... my whole country has them. I did not mean I can only buy what you have with "three months of what's left of my salary after expenses", I meant "my salary (*), after tax discounts, multiply by 3 and then you'll have the price the goods your mentioned if I was to buy them in my home town".
(*) I am a public employee with a salary 1.5 times the average for a guy in my line of work in my town.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
I don't care what anybody says, Notepad is still my favorite.
or how about NOT corrupting them in the first place? Is that possible?
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.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
I think that a lot of the features in MS Word and OOo are not necessary for most users and most documents, but I use automatic paragraph numbering all the time, so that by itself keeps me from using or recommending Abiword.
It does seem like a good program for simple documents, and the cool thing about it is that it can export to a huge number of different formats, more than either MS Word or OpenOffice can.
It certainly has its place, but until it can handle numbered lists, its place is not on my desktop unfortunately.
I generally do my word processing in (g)vim + LaTeX. Why? Because I frequently like to do my work from the command line (eg. over SSH connections), and LaTeX lets me do that.
I'm disappointed that fewer and fewer new programs (eg ncurses type stuff) are being written for the command line - I'd like to be able to run a commandline PIM to hotsync with my palmpilot, among other things, but that software just isn't out there.
Sure, one can't entirely replace the other feature-for-feature, but PSP does fairly well in its market. AbiWord could very well do the same.
Method of processing duck feet
I used Abiword for a while, but it seemed very buggy. Several times, I had to import a file I started in AbiWord and fix it in someone else's copy of Word. I haven't used it in a little while now, so it may have improved.
It is a decent replacement for Word, if you don't need lots of fancy features, but I personally have been a lot happier with OpenOffice and its word processor (even though that's all I've used so far). The export as PDF function in OO is very cool, IMO.
I always knew the entire concept was flawed, this page explains why:
http://www.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html
This is invaluable for constructing documents and manuals of, say, 50 pages through several hundred pages in length.
If you compose a long document with a table of contents, you can construct all your chapters, headers and subheaders, the whole thing in Outline View and place your body paragraphs underneath the headings. Then reorganizing the structure of the document (a major task) becomes a snap. You can also use style sheets to give your headers a consistent look.
OpenOffice and AbiWord ignore outlining. This is one piece of Word's functionality that they have never felt it a priority to clone.
I know this is a feature that few people use, but I can't live without it. If I need to compose a letter of a few pages, there are any number of programs I can use. But if I have to write a medium-sized technical manual, there is nothing out there that will do what Microsoft Word can do, for me.
For years I have suggested to the OpenOffice team that they incorporate an Outline View like MS Word's, but they have never responded to this. I guess I'm in the minority.
I can be clearer.
.DOC compatibility. .DOC - capable word processors are the real standard. Words interface is available in many other projects, including OO, and it changes so much between versions, that it cannot be called "standard". .DOC compatibility. And OO has it. So, it's not a good idea to imply that you are going to have an standardization problem because you don't use MSWord, because that's just plain wrong. You will have it only if the program you use doesn't manage .DOC. If it does, you are still in the de facto standard when it comes to documents.
Word is the most popular word processor. It doesn't make it standard.
Take the web for example. Apache is not the standard. HTTP is. Whichever server that serves HTTP is going to be good ( we all know that is not exactyl true, anyway).
What I was pointing out is that the only problem that non-MS word processors generate when it comes to standardization is the
The only thing people are expected to find is MS
(plus OOWriter copies Word interface, to some extent)
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.
If they think that the only thing missing is a grammar checker, then they haven't written any real documents.
I've used AbiWord, it is not even close to competing. Maybe for writing letters to grandma...
There are lots of word processors better and closer to MS Word.
WordPro, Wordperfect, OpenOffice, Papyrus, etc.
All of these are better than AbiWord. What was that, getting a programmer dude to review a word processor? The same kind of guys who whip up man pages? Ugh!
I agree with you.
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.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
funny you had that problem:
using excel 2000.
Help menu -> MS Office help.
Type in 'keeping column headers visible when you scroll'.
Two hits returned on this search query, one of which tells you exactly how to do this.
Microsoft provides a great help system, if you actually take the few seconds to use it.
(Having said that - I've been using Abiword and kword a lot recently, and liking them for their lack of bloat and speed - But to claim that MS help offers no assistance is a little misleading - MS always have provided good documentation and help in their products.)
I agree. I teach mathematics, and have to prepare exams with equations, etc. Word does a crappy job of formatting equations. Whenever I use word, I feel like I'm sitting at a typewriter, with someone standing beside me who waves a dictionary in my face, randomly strikes keys on the typewriter, and yanks the paper out before I'm finished --- the word-processor is fighting me every step of the way. Finally, I gave up, and decided to write the exams by hand: because it was quicker to do it that way. That is, until I learned LaTeX.
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.
You don't necessarily write the file to repair it - just opening it doesn't mean you have to write the result out until the user tries to save.
You could just replace the "Open and repair" with a more robust open implementation and the user would never know.
he's right, you know
Grammar checking isn't a feature.
Grammar checking is a human viral meme which infects software.
-kgj
-kgj
Clearly you've never had to try and format a document to suit your liking instead of Microsoft's. It's just hideous. Delete a paragraph, lose a seeminly unassociated image somewhere elso on the page. The whole concept of markup is fscked.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Writing a program to check grammar is hard. You will notice that it will frequently flag some bit of grammar and say that it may be wrong, with an explanation of how to tell. Obviously that means it will give you false positives, where it complains about something that is perfectly correct. In fact, the better your grammar in the first place, the more often the checker is wrong, and the more false positives you will have to ignore. (The worse your grammar, the more useful you will find the grammar checker, too.)
If you think the Word grammar checker is so bad, tell me something: what grammar checker is better? MS bought Grammatik and bundled that with Word, and Grammatik is the best grammar checker I have ever used. (It's still brain-dead, with lots of false positives; it's just that I have never used anything better. I'll admit I haven't used many grammar checkers anyway.)
Here's a web page, from a company that sells a grammar checker called Grammar Slammer. I've never used it. But this page talks about what you can reasonably expect a grammar checker to do for you, and it's worth reading:
http://englishplus.com/news/readthis.htm
In short, Word's grammar checker is kind of dumb, but I don't think it's really much different from other available grammar checkers.
P.S. What would it take to make a free, open source software grammar checker? When I think about it, it actually seems very doable. You need an "engine" that can read in the text, do some parsing, and apply rules; and where a rule matches, pop up a dialog. Then you just need a whole bunch of rules, and an open source development process would allow many people to contribute rules. Potentially, once the engine is done, you will get dozens to hundreds of rules and it will quickly become just as good as the proprietary, closed-source grammar checkers.
You could easily make multiple rule sets: English (American), English (Queen's), French, Klingon, etc.
Heck, how about English (Klingon): "There is no honor in passive voice! Rewrite NOW!"
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
;)
.DOC files, which is the only Word feature many people need.
Ok, I understand that there must be a lot of characteristics that OO doesn't share with MSWord, but I don't believe they belong to the word processor in the first place.
Revision tracking is a feature I'd rather not have in the documents I publish, or at least, I'd like it to be something I'd have to opt-in. I don't really want everybody in my development group reading whichever previous versions I wrote.
Anyway, I got the point. MSWord has a lot of features that will never be implemented elsewhere.
The fact is that to do that, the same design principles would have to be followed. Those are flawed.
Word is many things that don't belong to word processing. I believe OOWriter implements in a compatible way those that do, and many that don't. Plus, it has compatibility with
impossible to tell whether this consideration of msword v. abiword is serious or early aprilfools.
i do not see how anyone could seriously consider abiword as a replacement for msword let alone consider it to be on par.
every time i have the misfortune to use abiword it crashes, trashes the doc, prints something other than how the doc is formatted, etc. it is slow, and seems determined to do it's own thing, which is about the only thing that makes it on par with msword.
but there are those who just hate everything microsoft--why? no reason! who needs a reason! just remember the industries and millions of jobs spawned to cover microsoft's ass thanks to microsoft's host of holes, bugs and other crap--i mean features! you can thank microsoft negligence for keeping all those people employed.
all seriousness aside: given only one or the other on a m$ machine i would use msword. Else I will do fine without, as always.
My guess is MS will whine that the name "Abi-Word" infringes on the name "Microsoft Word."
You're making assumptions about how word works. From what I understand it uses memory mapped files, which means that in order to "open" the repaired file, a copy has to be on disk somewhere, which means that the repair must modify the original file before it gets mapped.
I use AbiWord all the time but I use it on WinXP. I read somewhere that Gnumeric is going to be ported over which will be great since it's far superior (IMHO) to Excel. Most people hear Open Source and think Linux but there's a project called the OpenCD that's trying to get people weaned off MS by starting at the App level. They have many useful programs on the ISO including AbiWord. BTW OpenOffice is OK but not as good as an AbiWord/Gnumeric combo.
Although I bought the suse box because I wanted to try it out and my cable was down. Funny part is, I actually think I'm going to keep it installed. I find it more responsive then my previous distro.
Abiword is slow on a Pentium III 800MHz, 384MB of RAM? Perhaps something is seriously misconfigured about your computer. It's pretty snappy on my old K6-2/300 with 128MB (Fedora Core 1, ReiserFS).
"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..."
/. can do better only if our posts are better informed than others'. Being judgemental without even reading others' article carefully or doing simple fact-checking tests certainly won't score points.
Maybe someone already replied to you, but in case they didn't - please read an article more carefully before you reach an conclusion. The author mentioned "insert field" option, and also mentioned that field has a ticking clock! You compared it to "insert->Date/Time" in MS Word, which is static text (not even a field). Abi Word also has "insert->Date/Time" which is static text, but they also have "insert->field->Date/Time", which is a dynamic field with a tick clock (In fact, the author used a separate block to talk about this feature in detail with a separate line/paragraph that reads "time field keeps ticking". I really don't know how you missed that).
You're also confusing (or at least your post is very confusing on this point) memory footprint size and binary sizes of a program. The author said binary size is under 5 MB, which has nothing to do with RAM as you mentioned. If you want to compare RAM usage, author mentioned its about 6 MB, AND author failed to mention that once a couple mid-sized documents were loaded, the RAM quickly runs to 15-20MB which overtakes MS Word by a couple megs (even when abi failed to load a dozen images in the MS Word97-formatted files), so RAM is not a strong field for Abi if one does such a simple test. Binary size is.
The review from flexbeta does seem quite amateurish and maybe biased, but
Well, I am forced to use Word at work and I do hate it. For several concrete reasons, and not just because it is a Microsoft products.
First, figures are a nightmare to deal with. No matter how hard you try, word insists on randomly rearranging them if you type text in the wrong place.
Equations and references are also a real pain in the neck. Having used LaTeX for many years in grad school, I know how things Should be.
Not to mention the fact I have Word 2000, and my boss just got 2003, so we can't even easily interchange files. Or the how Word makes a nightmare out of dealing with formatting and fonts. Or how easily bullets and numbered lists can get screwed up.
When anything anything beyond the most basic functions, it's my experience that Word quickly becomes a royal pain in the ***.
Download my free songs!
"But to claim that MS help offers no assistance is a little misleading..."
I didn't claim no there was no help in MS office. I only claimed that the search words I entered, and there were several of them, did not give an answer. I tried the same thing in OO and immediately found the answer. In that particular instance, OO was better. Obviously, if I had known the correct search terms, I would have found what I wanted.
"MS always have provided good documentation and help in their products."
I disagree with that. If you try to support Windows XP, you find that the documentation is extremely scattered and poorly written. Also, if an MS tech support rep. is told of a mistake in a manual, he has no way to get it fixed, apparently.
If you want all the life, all the juice, all the individuality sucked out of your prose, there's no better way to do it than with a grammar checker.
For example, this post doesn't grammar check. Why? Because it sounds like a human being might have written it, and not some soulless insect from the marketing department.
Try loading a 2 Mb .txt file on any version of AbiWord. 2 minutes later your file still won't have finished loading and Abiword will be taking 50 Mb of memory.
It also has problems with the various file formats it supposedly supports. Try saving a document as XHTML and then re-opening it. Last time I did that, it wouldn't even display it correctly.
And no, I won't report a bug. OO.o and Word 97 work just fine for me.
Like it or not, submitting Word format electronically is now required in many situations for filling out applications, forms, etc. Any other word processor that cannot read AND write Word format is never going to gain market share. And only being able to write "Hello world" in Word is not enough.
For example, I tried to use Abiword to write a two-page grant proposal that had to be submitted electronically in Word format. I had to include some simple graphics (two data plots). I wrote something and sent it out. Fortunately it got checked by someone else before going to the sponsor- in Word it had the wrong number of pages, really screwed up formatting, etc. I had to find a Windows computer and use Word to fix everything.
Then I found this on the abiword web site: "There are no plans to support binary MS Word export." http://www.abisource.com/twiki/bin/view/Abiword/FI mostly write technical documents. troff takes less effort to write, I'll continue using that instead of AbiWord/OpenOffice/MS Word. WYSIWYG is generally not that useful if you do mainly structured documents or if you need fine control of typesetting. Typesetting languages with the right scripts are generally the easiest. If you need purely structured documents then DocBook-SGML is not a bad route to go. (SGML is fancier and more human-friendly than XML, which is what you really want if you are manually editing tags)
.rtf to .doc. This will make it load correctly in wordpad, without getting too fancy/bizarre on the formatting that Office2K likes to put in.
Also when doing resumes you really have to make sure that the resume looks correct in Wordpad, Word97 and Office2k/XP. Seems that these are what recruiters use (wordpad appearing to be the most common). Hint: save as word97 RTF and rename
Recruiters seem to hate PDFs (I guess they prefer file formats with macro viruses). Although I've had a great deal of luck with HTML. Mostly I just do my resume in troff and provide it as PDF to the manager/engineers and HTML to the recruiters and everyone is happy.
Guide to doing your resume in troff (and taking advantage of macros to painlessly customize your resume).
Your Resume: Part 1 Your Resume: Part 2
If you do a lot of technical documents these tools work well with troff (or LaTeX):
Graphviz for doing automated diagrams
Gnuplot for doing scientific graphing (it can output postscript and ascii)
TGIF a 2-d drawing tool with a light-weigh intuitive UI.
gEDA for schematics and pcb layout
xcircuit extremely powerful 2-d drawing tool. originally designed for schematics, but is useful for any sort of diagram.
Also if you were wondering: Résumé == Curriculum vitae (CV)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
So it's a flawed implementation showing through in the GUI.
Even so, why not just attempt to open a file, if it fails copy the file, use the repair on it and open the copy as a "repaired copy" transparently to the user.
Mod parent up...this isn't a troll.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
I'm supprised AbiWord even got mentioned. AbiWord or MSWord is nothing compared to OpenOffice.
AbiWord sucks. There I said it. Don't -1 Troll me, I really mean it. Why does this guy like it? It has large (ugly) icons? Please. As far as I can tell, it supports none of the more advanced features that other word processing programs (such as Word, OpenOffice, KWord, etc.) have. The style editor does not seem nearly as advanced as the style editors of the others. I find no support for adding indexes or tables of contents. I can't find any support for inserting special objects like graphs and tables. Pretty much the only thing it has going for it is that it has a small memory footprint, but then again so does vi. That doesn't mean I'm going to use vi to write a paper.
Without these features, AbiWord cannot think about replacing Word (or OO Writer). Maybe WordPad, but it is simply not powerful enough to be a full fledged word processor. Now maybe some of this stuff actually is supported but not easily found, but if someone has to read the manual just to make a simple chart its not going to replace MS Office.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
Good for outlines.
Designing GUI's by generic principles instead of common sense is stupid.
Even if upholding the principle, the fix does not have to be irreversible (It could back up the corrected file), nor does it have to "check in" with the user by hiding the option in an obscure position (How about a dialog box question?)
My WAG is Word has about 90% Word compatibility. I could be wrong, it could actually be worse.
The lack of grammar checking plug-in for the time being is not a drawback. I don't use word processors much these days but when I do, I often find myself yelling at the screen, "That's right! I had intended to use passive voice!"
Not because I hate Bill Gates, not because MS is a convicted monopolist, not because I am a Linux zealot.
Just what the hell are you doing on slashdot?!
To the best of my knowledge, it's already not that difficult to read .doc formats, if you overlook that Microsoft can change them at any time. An XML transition might or might not help with this, but personally I don't know if it'll make that much difference. (I'm not an expert, however.)
Much if not most of the work has already been done in project like OpenOffice, and the AbiWord people could simply adapt that code if then needed to. I think the really big problem is writing the code to adapt someone else's native document object model to your own native document object model. If MS Word happens to store table information in a dramatically different way from how AbiWord likes to think of it, there will be a lot of possibly complicated translation code that will need to be written and maintained by someone. Or perhaps one vendor simply decides to add a simple feature that doesn't fit into the other vendor's object model at all well.
If the XML is understandable, then perhaps it will make it easier for someone to write transformation style sheets between Microsoft and other formats that will do the conversions properly before the alternative software has to even think about loading them. We'll have to wait and see.
The article Anatomy of a Software bug quoted in another Slashdot story tells the story of an MsWord bug. A "Write Error" can occur when saving a document after several hours of work. The article says you can workaround the problem by doing your editing in Normal view. (As opposed to Page view(?)--I'm not an MsWord user either.) That may be the problem you noticed.
The bug was created with the introduction of multiple undo/redo in an old design. I understand from the article that large parts of MsWord need to be rewritten. Will that ever happen or will it die? How can software survive more than 10 years at a leader position? Probably not without recurrent and effective code refactoring.
It doesn't seem to be common among slashdot readers at least, but personally I've found that the grammar checker is one of the features that I really miss since moving away from Windows.
Certainly it makes mistakes, and I turn it off when I'm working on some text where Word's grammar isn't particularly important. It'd be silly to trust it with pirate grammar. But when I'm proofreading a large document, I've found it very useful, just for its ability to locate places where there might be problems.
I can check them and I don't have to agree with them, it's often found things that I agree with in hindsight but wouldn't have noticed otherwise. In my case it's especially good for things like locating passive statements where active ones would do a better job, and so on. On many occasions it really has helped me to improve my writing style.
If OpenOffice or AbiWord had a grammar checker at least as good as MS Word, I'd use them all the time. The closest I've managed to find in the open source world is style and diction. They find a few things, but are relatively primitive to what Word does.
Speaking of which, could anyone suggest a good script or program to convert .doc files to .sxw files from the command line? I'd like something that I can run all at once over a hierarchy of folders containing lots of old documents, and ideally report whatever problems it has during the conversion process.
So what linespace you think is suitable for a PhD thesis, a single line? As far as I know, most universities require thesis to use linespaces of 1.5 and even 2. I haven't seen any thesis using single line spacing as far as I can remember. I think it would look way too tight.
Last time I used AbiWord I couldn't find its equation editor. Is it a lacking feature? If so, I think it is a serious limitation of the product.
Hey Adrien,
Interesting post.
MS Word is so quirky that I think it needs a lot of re-writing. Trashing its own files is only one of the many time-consuming problems.
Staroffice has a built in Wordperfect converter. In Linux I use wpd2sxw built from a tarball. It converts Wordperfect files to the Openoffice format. The downside is that its a dreaded command line program:
.doc files so she could work on them in the comfort of M$.
$ wpd2sxw "blah blah.wpd" blah blah.sxw"
Works like a charm. Even taught my daughter ("I hate
Linux") to use it for some files she had to edit. Off course she then converted them to
> is AbiWord a worthy MS Word replacement?
I don't think a good MS Word replacement should be an MsWord clone. I think OpenOffice is already too much of a Word clone.
It seems to me that AbiWord already suffers from the stuff everything in the toolbar syndrome. Why make the toolbar bar customizable and movable? Because that's what developers think is a fix for the poor usability of their software. In Word, it is easier to trash your toolbar than to type a letter.
Will AbiWord implement Personalized menus, the most stupid workaround to the problem of having too many menu items?
No innovation has been made in the recent years regarding page-layout software usability. That's depressing. I used to teach people how to use Word. Sometimes, I felt like teaching how to troubleshoot.
Programs like Word made the user model too complex and illogical. It has become close to impossible for a user to understand and anticipate how Word functions. I don't think that solely code design and bugs are responsible for that. I think that the user model needs to be completely reviewed.
I completely agree with you about the typesetting issues of Word. If you write the same text in LaTeX and Word, the output of Word will always look like rubbish compared to TeX-Typeset. That is even _if_ you have a bit of knowledge about typesetting (which most Users don't have. Look at their texts!). I for myself have completely stopped to use Word-Processors of any kind. LaTeX is faster, uses less space, typesets beautifully and produces output in the right formats (that is pdf and ps). I don't only use it for articles and the like but also for letters and, with Prosper, to create presentations.
:-). And _they don't have a clue about typesetting_! But the most important point is: Users don't write maths.
But, let me guess: You are a technical user, aren't you? Probably mathematician, physicist or something similar. LaTeX is the de facto standard in these fields. It is not at all in the offices.
Why? Because users want to see what they type, as they type. They want to have complete control over the layout. Even more, they have a crude fear towards everything that looks like a programming language (or better: Everything that is shown in Courier New by the editor
Mathematicians, physicists and engineers love LaTeX, because you can write things like \[ f*g=\int g(x') f(x-x')\; {\rm d} x'\] and it will look gorgeous. But secretaries want to write letters, hangouts for the pinboard, signs to put up above the coffeemachine ("who drinks the last cup has to make new", with "new" written in 72pt, brown colour, ArialBlack). If you do this in TeX, it takes ages.
It's ab bit like the issue of Linux on the desktop: What you and I consider an advantage (No need to think of the typeset, writing in plain text, the right output-format for printing and publishing, etc.) are in fact disadvantages for the average Word-User ("I want headings in blue", "I want WYSIWYG", "My Boss wants a doc-file 'cause he can't open pdf",...), (just like the customisability of Linux and the mighty commandline makes the user mad during installation and maintenance; to explain my comparison).
I would still use Word over Abiword even if neither, or both, had a grammar checker. And I would still turn it off.
I care about English, not word processing evangelism. But congratulations for leaping to a totally idiotic conclusion based on zero evidence. Who's the real zealot here?
Read Pynchon.
Acutally, I'm pretty sure it copies the file before it repairs it -- if you try to save it, the default filename is something like ASDFABE.DOC
It does contain something like MS Access, it is just not a separate application.
Word does have hyphenation, but it's not in the default install. You can also insert a non-breaking hyphen if you wish (ask Clippy).
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.
Window -> Freeze Panes
MS "Works" (not "Works Suite") is that stripped down "Office Suite" that we've seen bundled with new PC's for over a decade. It still has that stripped-down word processor.
MS "Works Suite" is Works plus Word, Money, Encarta, Streets & Trips and Picture It. For $100 retail, this seems like a pretty good deal to me. When shopping for a new PC, make sure it comes with "Works Suite" if MS Word is important to you.
Here's Microsoft's Works/Works Suite comparison page: Choose the right Works solution for you and your family.
TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
the only draw back to AbiWord is that it currently does not feature a grammar checker
If a grammar checker is the staple of a decision for a word processor then we live in a sad state!
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
The article itself may be off, but for goodness sake! Cut the complaining a little! The folks at Abisource have done a fantastic job and they've done it in their spare time. They deserve a helluva lot of respect for it. What non-selfish acts have you performed for the rest of the world recently?
--I spent ages searching for a solid open source word processor, and Abiword is these days easily head and shoulders above every other option out there; it has in the last six months alone matured into a very solid little package; the current stable release is 2.0.10, and it is STABLE. I've experienced no crashes, and I use it all the time. I use it as a full word processor capable of handling 200 page files with nimble ease, a general note pad, a general spell checker, a document printer, a file converter, and all with comfort, simplicity and at a very tidy speed. I've used professional packages which have far more bumps and knots, and I've paid for them. For a work in progress, Abiword is amazing.
Now, granted, Abiword isn't as feature-rich as Word, but give it time. Mozilla took a while before it was stable, (remember???), but now look at it! In the mean time, cut some slack and look at the successes rather than the failures. I've followed Abiword's development over the last three years, and it has come a long way.
Abiword is a pleasure to use and it doesn't smell of MS. --I do actually appreciate the esthetics of a small program size. The download is only 4.83 Megs, and that's how big a word processor ought to be! Bloat-ware annoys me conceptually, and Microsoft annoys me directly. Abiword simply feels better, and when you write, one's state of mind is of paramount importance. --Feng shui is largely about how physical esthetics affect one's psychology. Torn envelopes and unpaid bills strewn on the kitchen table, awkward objects littering the entrance, bad colors. . , those hundred little dings to ones subconscious add up to crappy moods and guarded personalities, and you aren't even aware it's happening. The same applies to software; most of us spend hours every day with our minds merged with our computers.
And honestly! How can anybody do their best work while jacked into the offspring of Gates?
-FL
OK, so how would you make any of these programs better? IF you don't put the features on a toolbar or menu where do you put them? Or, should we just go back to using WordPerfect for DOS? Or better, yet "Edit".
Scott
©20014 angrykeyboarder & Elmer Fudd. All Wights Wesewved
I am a phycisist surround by chemists and phycisists. For math, it is standard. However, among phycisists it is somewhat common but by no means standard (personal experience from two universities and a research lab), except for theoretical physics. Chemists hardly ever use LaTeX. The reason that I referred to PhD theses was that I paged through a couple of them in order to get inspiration for my rant. :)
But secretaries want to write letters, hangouts for the pinboard, signs to put up above the coffeemachine
For single-page, single-copy documents, LaTeX makes less sense since the author will spend relatively much time on the style settings (although you might use a Wysiwyg front-end) and the reader won't spend much time reading it. I was thinking of scientific and technical documents that are lengthy and contain sections, figures, and maybe equations. More than one page also means that you will note that the bottom lines on the pages never align if you use Word (and probably AbiWord as well).
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
Mod parent up...this isn't overrated!
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
I don't mean that making better than these programs is easy. However, I think it should be trivial for any user to type a letter or a report.
Discussing the toolbar issue is irrelevant. (Just as a quick note, I think it makes sense to relocate some buttons, given that the format of common documents (Letter, A4) requires more vertical space than horizontal space.)
So the toolbar was just an example. Consider how hard it is to deal with automatic chaptering and numbering in Word. There are many, many other examples.
An advantage of old programs is that they were more predictable, at least.
Have you tried OpenOffice.org? It comes with a really nice equation editor built into oowriter (their version of Word). Also, calc (their version of Excel) is compatable with all versions of Excel.
-TheDawgLives suckitdown
I haven't tried OO yet. I may check out their spreadsheet. As for preparing documents, I'm sold on LsTeX, and really don't feel compelled to investigate alternatives. It does EXACTLY what I want it to do. Thanks.
But then, neither does Word ;-)
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck