Slashdot Mirror
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.)
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.
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?
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.
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!
... 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)
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!!
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.
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.
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.
Ah but Gnumeric is missing a very key feature that is required in the business I'm in. It doesn't automatically interpret HTML tables as a spreadsheet. With both OOCalc and Excel, if you have an HTML table labeled as an .xls file, either program will automatically open it as if it were an excel file. Incredibly useful feature for custom web programming with report generation.
d. Taylor Singletary,
reality technician techra.el
Children use pico.
Men use vi.
Heroes use emacs.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
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!!!!
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.
I've posted about this before...
In my opinion, YES - in quite a number of environments a grammar checker is a vital feature of a word processor. I don't want to take ultimate control away from the user but I do want an optional feature to highlight syntactic structures which are not 'straight forward'.
To all the trolls who insist that a grammar checker is a crutch which will ultimately damage the user's literary skills, all I can do is recommend you try to read some hastily written factual documents from an average office worker who does not use a grammar checker. I consider a grammar checker an essential tool - it is such a pity that the best available at the moment is Word's somewhat lack-lustre effort. I'd also welcome an extension which verifies consistent style.
Bring me any open source text-editing program that checks grammar better than word does (which shouldn't be hard - lets face it!) and I'll evangelise.
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!
"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.
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.
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.
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
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.
To clarify this, I tried on several machines of different speeds, all with the same results. Just open a new document and type gibberish on a single line and let it wrap. When you get near the end of a line, all the text starts to have a refresh issue. It's not a machine limitation because it's the same between 200mhz and 1.8Ghz. It's not a spellcheck problem because it happens when spellcheck is turned off.
I did a quick check on the Abiword bugzilla, but the only mention I could find was claimed to have been fixed. The latest stable download still has it, so I'm not sure which version they meant.
Revision tracking. If you can use Revision Tracking in OO 1.1.2 without OO mangling the document, you're one-up on me. I couldn't get it to work worth crap.
Comment of the year
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
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.
Out of curiosity about this "new Word killer", I opened a 100 page OfficeXP .doc file, complete with pictures and tables into my newly installed AbiWord.
.doc files, it ain't replacing Word.
First time crashed. Second time, crawled to a halt, took 5-10 seconds to scroll down one page.
Sorry, but unless a word editor can flawless handle huge crappy