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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.
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?
Tiny download, very fast load time, about 1/3 second for me on the first run.
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)
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.
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.
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.
...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.
what do you use for word processing and desktop publishing?
Latex and Lyx
# ssh -l neo the_matrix; killall -9 agent_smith
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!!!!
True, but I'm a recent convert to NeoOffice/J, frequently mentioned on here, which is a wrapped-version of OOo that does support native cut and paste, along with double-clickable documents from the Finder and vastly improved font-rendering.
That last point is worth stressing - I used OOo through X11 and working with imported spreadsheets was a pain due to the vast font differences. This is vastly improved in NeoOffice. In fact the issue is gone for me, but I'm not so rash as to say gone for everyone.
Cheers,
Ian
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'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.
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
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.
Actually, that claim is pure FUD. The parts of IE which are "in the OS" are things like GDI -- which Firefox also uses. DLLs like MSHTML and the like are counted into the memory consumed by the process.
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"
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
What a bizarre way to do it - why would the user ever want to *not* repair the file when they try to open it?
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.
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.
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.