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.)

Comments

Not worth the time to read it, summary below...

[garcia]

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.

Re:Not worth the time to read it, summary below...

[Mongoose Disciple]

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).

Yup. Like it or not, the reality is that Word is the standard in the realm of word processors. Now, you can grab the odd caveman who's never seen Word and teach them to use your word processor, but to really gain users, you're going to have to steal some market share from Word. You don't necessarily need to emulate all of Word's features and quirks to get those users, but they're probably going to want to be able to use their old documents.

We really don't know from the review how AbiWord handles this at all. It might do a great job or a terrible job; we just don't know. Honestly, I'd rather see a review from someone who is an experienced user of Word, even if they're less technical.

Re:Not worth the time to read it, summary below...

[toopc]

You've hit upon a huge problem Word has, and acutally has had for quite some time --making the features disoverable.

As a previous poster said many people only use 2% of the features of a program like Microsoft Word. Which is to say they use it just ever so slightly different than they would use a typewriter. Just about nobody reads the help files on software, so although Word can probably do a half dozen different things they'd find useful, they may never discover those features. I can't count the number of times on some messageboard where someone has said, "I wish Word could do this," only to have me reply, "It can" and show them how.

So that leads to the obvious problems like you've found in this review. I use something like Open Office Writer or AbiWord and I immediately notice all the things they can't do that Word can. While someone who only uses 2% of the features of Word thinks it's a direct feature match up.

Good starting point

[Un0r1g1nal]

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.

AbiWord is good

[stratjakt]

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'd call corrupting files more than a quirk, too.

[Futurepower(R)]

"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 .DOC format, and it opened fine in Word. So, if you use MS Word, you should also install Open Office, because OO is sometimes a necessary tool to make MS Word work.

Another story: Someone gave me an MS Excel spreadsheet. I opened it in Excel, but was unable to discover how to make the row and column headings stay visible when I scrolled to the right or down. The Excel help was no help.

I opened the Excel spreadsheet in OO. The OO help was clear about how to make headings stationary. I did what it said, and saved the file as an MS Excel file. Then I opened it in MS Excel, and it worked fine. Again, OO showed that it is a very useful MS Office tool.

Re:I can understand hating IE and looking to repla

[hankwang]

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.

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.

Fancy stuff

[gad_zuki!]

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.

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 .doc format.