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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.)
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 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.
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.
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.
...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.
Unless you're running a 486SX with a 200MB HD that's got to be the stupidest requirement for a document editor I've ever heard of. Fuck the size! Fuck the memory footprint! Who cares? This is 2004. I've got half a terabyte of storage. I've got 2 gigs of memory. I can download a 100 meg file in under 5 minutes. You're not going to sell me on a document editor because it's small. lol.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
It's also $200 or so (unless you get it with a new computer).
I'd call randomly corupting files and moving images around more than annoying quirks. The fact is, Word's only killer feature is 100% Word compatibility. Combine that with a monopoly, saturation advertising and restrictive licensing deals with OEMs and you have a WP that's hard to beat.
i 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.
I'm sorry, but word just does NOT have 100% word compatibility. Give me ANY two versions of word, and I can generage a doc on one version that doesn't load properly on the other version.
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
Maybe this argument would carry more weight if Word was better debugged!
Part of the reason I only use 2% of Word's features is because every time I step out of the normal everyday stuff to use one of those sexy features, I find:
1. It is very poorly implemented (I mean, c'mon, headers and footers are still an abortion in Word 2000!)
2. It is buggy; many of the advanced features in Word work poorly or not at all! Hell, they can't even make the auto-number stuff work consistently. If you restart numbering in each section of a document, how do you tell Word exactly which pages you want to print? Most of these things were haphazardly pasted onto Word without any thought or design.
3. I have had to maintain compatibility with various versions of Word. Those advanced features are exactly what breaks most horribly trying to move from one version of Word to the next. Yeah, that's exactly what I want to use in a manual I have to maintain for the next 5 years through several versions of Word.
So, in short, the reason I only use 2% of Word is because Word forces me too!
> you can grab the odd caveman who's never seen Word and teach them to use
> your word processor
All of my cavemen buddies seemed inexorably drawn to Word, even after I tried to coax them out of the cave and show them the reality of choice in word processors. It turns out that MS was using a complex flame/puppet/shadow mechanism, otherwise known as "TV", to project ads for Office XP onto their cave walls.
> We really don't know from the review how AbiWord handles this at all.
> It might do a great job or a terrible job; we just don't know.
Speaking as someone who never got stuck in Gates's cave for any extended period of time, I can say that although I really want to remove MS Word from my daily work, using Abiword in a Word shop is cumbersome because of DOC compatibility issues for big, complex documents that use more obscure features. This itself is not the only issue, since you can experience the same problem in different revision/hotfix/OS combinations of Word. The main problems I see:
- Like parent says, Word is a de facto standard. This is due in large part to people applying it as a working format AND a document exchange/publication format. If a customer uses Word to publish and accept documents, and you think that's dumb, you're out of luck. You fall in line or lose your customer.
- Ads, a pricetag, and brand recognition add to a sense of stability and trust for MS, whether it's deserved or not.
I really think discouraging the use of Word, or any other closed standard, as a publishing format, is a good idea in general. There's no need to kill it on principle if some people like working with it, but it might be more efficient in many cases if people, groups, or companies have choice in the document creation and refinement phases. Agreeing to document exchange in open standards could make business more efficient (no confusion and associated correction effort/delays), and maybe even more competitive.
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.....
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?
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We really don't know from the review how AbiWord handles this at all. It might do a great job or a terrible job; we just don't know. Honestly, I'd rather see a review from someone who is an experienced user of Word, even if they're less technical.
Interesting that you should ask for that. I've been thinking about writing (another) "review" of StarOffice/OpenOffice compared to MS Office. I'm a manager at a large university, and I moved to a Linux desktop about 2 yrs ago. I get lots of Word/Excel/PPT docs from co-workers and other employees, and I'm able to work transparently with those documents.
While there have been many StarOffice (or OpenOffice) "reviews", I don't think any have talked about how transparently you can work with documents, how easily you can import and export docs, and how the imported Word doc may differ under StarOffice/OpenOffice.
Hint: The only issues I've had with imported documents have been with word- and paragraph-wrapping (widow/orphan). If I print out my (imported) copy and bring it to a meeting, a paragraph might start at the top of page 12 for me, but at the bottom of page 11 for someone else who printed it from MS Word.
What a bizarre way to do it - why would the user ever want to *not* repair the file when they try to open it?
Your English 'professor' may like it, but try giving it to anyone who writes for a living (or a real editor), and they'll put a nice big red line though it, being that it's mostly unreadable.
- Single 'that' when two would be clearer
- 'says' and 'speak' next to each other
- But basically: far too many words used
No wonder you pissed off Word.
If you were to rewrite it, I'd suggest:
"The letter says a great deal about how children should feel about themselves"
Score:-1, Funny
Unfortunately, this won't help in the short term. Its going to be a very, very long time (if ever) before the only office users are office 2k3 users. There are still, after all, people out there using Office 97.
Simple filters should be as easy as a XML transform.
This is a popular fallacy. But XML only says how the data is stored - it says absolutely nothing about what data is stored.
Consider how you might store a table layout in XML. There are literally thousands of ways you might go about it. The chances of you and someone else even choosing to store the same bits of information, let alone with a similar structure, are, frankly, pretty slim. So, no, it's not "easy as an XML transform". The only advantage of XML is that it makes it easier to read the data -- but the tricky part is interpreting it, and XML does nothing to help there.
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.
Word's only killer feature is 100% Word compatibility.
.DOC file format... It would allow that small office with 3 employees to continue to happily use their Office 95 CD's they got back in 1995 and work perfectly fine for them.
which it DOES NOT HAVE.
Word 2003 is not 100% compatable with Word 97. word 2000 had trouble with word95 AND word97 files.
there are HUGE compatability problems between versions of Word that make the switch to Open Office look like tiny annoyances.
Microsoft intentionally does not want 100% compatability with previous version of the
Microsoft does not like nor want that.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
But seriously folks... Is a grammar checker really that important a feature?
Zealotry in action. If an open source program lacks a feature that many people agree is important, it's a "stupid, useless feature that no one uses." Once said open source program implements the feature, it's the greatest thing since sliced bread.
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.
My problem with Word is preventing it doing things it thinks I should do instead of doing what I tell it too do. I'd pay money for a SFTU MS-Word HowTo.
KWord doesn't run under MSWind, unlike both AbiWord and OpenOffice.
Well, that may be a slight exaggeration. I understand that for many versions of MSWind you can first install CygWin, and then install X Window, and then install KDE. And then you could install KWord. But the ONLY people who did that would be those *required* to have MSWind as the main OS on their computer. Everyone else would be happier running MSWind inside an emulator (VMWare?). And you've GOT to be a techie to put up with the process...including the process of getting KWord to start under MSWind. (And here I'm assuming that some experimental projects I saw a couple of years ago work and are stable now.)
So KWord won't be an MSOffice killer.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Not for nothing, but you are contradicting yourself. "Simple filters should be as easy as a XML transform." You said: The only advantage of XML is that it makes it easier to read the data -- but the tricky part is interpreting it, and XML does nothing to help there. Umm... yeah... if MS stores Word data using XML... and AbiWord knows the way XML is used to store the data, then it IS as simple as an XML transform. And not for nothing, but an XSLT pretty much IS an interpretation of XML... the code written in an XSLT is written to take in XML and apply a transformation to it based on how the source XML is organized. It's the whole point to an XML Transformation. It's like saying making orange juice is not as simple as squeezing an orange, because you have to squeeze an orange to do it.