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.

Abiword is a promsing app with lots of good features and a very neat interface. However, running it on a PC with XP Pro SP2, I got repeated crashes after plain-pasting web text and attempting a global change in font. For quick work, I'm sticking with Jarte, which is both fast and stable, though I find its visual style highly offputting.

I tried to replace OOo Writer with Abiword, because it looks promising. OOo is just too slow and Abiword looked like the solution. But it could not be: Under my Linux Mandrake 9.2 it was just unable to load an M$Word document (full of graphics, but for OOo it was no problem at all.) At office under Windows it crashed every time I tried to open *any* M$ Word document. It looks promising, and maybe for working in a document from the scratch, it is possible to owrk with it, but I can not still rely on Abiword at all.

Great word processor with same look and feel and Microsoft Word. Reads my .doc files fine. Doesn't have auto-correction function. It's lean and quick though, and I'm very pleased with it.

The AbiWord appears to be a acceptable word processor. The document can be saved in many formats. But there's just one problem that keeps popping up. It crashes a lot when cutting and pasting documents. It changes the look of a document that was originally typed using microsoft word. When Abiword prints the document, it stretches the fonts and clippart on the page. This problem came about when printing a document containing 3 columns. So far, there is no problem when typing a plain document using Abiword. Give Abiword a try and decide if the word processor fits your needs.

This is possibly the best word processor that works on FreeBSD, Linux, Windows, MacOS X, and a lot of other platforms. All the features of Word Pad + more!
Includes a spell-checker, full fonts menu, zoom capabilities, colored text, .doc compatable, etc. And its FREE as in FREEDOM!