Freeware

AbiWord: The Tiny, But Full Featured Word Processor

By EAN ⋅ August 3, 2007 ⋅  Email this Post ⋅  Print this Post ⋅ Post a Comment

Developer: The AbiWord Team / AbiSource
Version: 2.4.6
Download it Here.

Although I’ve had the program on my computer for some time now, today was the first time that I really sank my teeth into what AbiWord is made of. On first glance, and especially after visiting the AbiWord website, I was a little turned off by this program. It just looked amateurish - almost as if it would be completely devoid of options. After all, with so much competition on all platforms from big guns in the word processing market like Microsoft Office 2007 and Open Office, AbiWord really has to do something spectacular for it to make a name for itself. And on first glance, I just wasn’t seeing it.

To be honest, I originally installed this program because I was waiting for Open Office to download. I figured that I may as well install a smaller program and get started on my work while I was waiting for another word processor to download. The small file size was a big selling point for me without even realizing it. Ranging between 3 and 9 megabytes depending on the operating system, AbiWord is certainly a tiny word processor.

Just because AbiWord is small in file size doesn’t mean that it can’t perform though. Now, now. Sure, you can type documents on it just as well as you can in so many other programs, but AbiWord contains an additional feature that far too many other free word processors are missing: a grammar check.

If you want a grammar check, you really are pretty much stuck with the Microsoft Office suite of products. Yeah, you can get add-on grammar scanner packages for Open Office, but that’s just an extra step that should not be required. What if you just want to sit down and crank out a document? There’s no time to install extra stuff that Sun was too lazy to throw into Open Office - especially when you can pick up something like AbiWord that’s packed with nearly all of the same functionality (of the word processor) and a tenth of the file size.

As much as I enjoyed using AbiWord though, there was one feature that really bugged me. I couldn’t change the default file type when I save documents. I looked and looked, but there were no options under the preferences menus to change the damn save dialog’s default file type. Not only that, but even when I tried to manually tweak the AbiWord profile file to change the defaults - it wouldn’t budge. Nothing. How crappy.

Other than that little blemish (if anyone knows how to change the default save dialog file type, please let me know), AbiWord is a fine program. The built in spelling and grammar check work well, although they are still nothing compared to what is offered in Microsoft Word - but they get the job done. As always, the cross platform aspect of AbiWord is a big seller for me. However, it’s a fun little program to type quick documents on, but I really don’t think that it offers the deeper functions that I would need to consider it as a contender for a full Microsoft Word replacement. A year or two more into the development, though, and I may just change my mind.

Oh, and one more thing. AbiWord is currently only for PPC processors under OSX, so don’t expect to like it too much if you have an Intel Mac.

Try AbiWord for Yourself.

- Eric Norton

Update: Avadhut asked whether or not you can track changes on AbiWord. Although that’s a feature I rarely use, yes, Abiword does allow you to track changes to existing documents.