AbiWord

I thought I might try AbiWord instead of OpenOffice, since word processing was all I really needed, and not a full office suite. Unfortunately, AbiWord just plain doesn't work very well.

Nothing uses AbiWord's native file format, which is a good thing. The files it produces are HUGE and slow to open. Importing DOC or ODT files always resulted in screwed up formatting. Export to ODT didn't work at all, but instead made AbiWord crash completely. For that matter, it didn't seem to need much of a reason to crash, which it did frequently for no reason.

I think a lot of people would like a light-middleweight word processor, especially a free one. The idea behind AbiWord is a good one, but the execution is really bad.

AbiWord looked promising to me, since it was relatively small and supposedly fast. Not everyone wants or needs a full-blown office suite like OpenOffice or MS Office.

AbiWord has a few too many frustrating quirks, though. There is no help file, but instead, it simply directs the user to the AbiSource web site. Despite claims of compatibility with MS Word files, it opened my Word docs with mangled formatting and considerable data loss. A good many files wouldn't open at all, and even caused the program to crash.

I'm not saying AbiWord should be as full-featured as something like Word or OOo Writer, but I had hoped for a little more consistent performance and a little better utility.

I got AbiWord 2.4.1 on 1/5/2006, hoping it would put page numbers on a play I'd written. Jarte does it, but only on printout, I believe. So, I was looking forward to AbiWord. The play is only thirty pages long, and I didn't think it would be a problem on my Windows 98 SE with 256K RAM and a 160 GB drive. Wrong! I could not import my play as a DOC file, an RTF, or even as TXT. AbiWord crashed all three times. When I loaded a single page file, no problem. But if you're trying to get some real writing done, AbiWord may be a disappointment.