AbiWord vs. MS Word, For Now

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Posted by ryuzaki0 on Wednesday September 1, 2004 @01:51AM from the abiword-is-an-unsung-hero dept.

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.)

8 of 511 comments (clear)

Sadly... by cs02rm0 · 2004-09-01 01:54 · Score: 5, Informative

...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.
Not worth the time to read it, summary below... by garcia · 2004-09-01 01:54 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.
1. Re:Not worth the time to read it, summary below... by BenjyD · 2004-09-01 02:17 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  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.
2. Re:Not worth the time to read it, summary below... by toopc · 2004-09-01 02:26 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  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.
3. Re:Not worth the time to read it, summary below... by soybean · 2004-09-01 02:52 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  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.
Re:I can understand hating IE and looking to repla by bizpile · 2004-09-01 02:12 · Score: 5, Insightful

...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.
AbiWord is good by stratjakt · 2004-09-01 02:29 · Score: 5, Interesting

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!!!!
I'd call corrupting files more than a quirk, too. by Futurepower(R) · 2004-09-01 02:48 · Score: 5, Interesting

"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.