Microsoft Word: An Unnecessary Evil?
AbiWord 2.6.4
While AbiWord? can't replace all of Microsoft Office, it is a fairly slick word processor. (Actually, there is a spreadsheet Gnumeric that looks to be AbiWord's non-identical twin.) All the expected features are available: bold, underline, indentation, bullet lists, font, font color, font highlighting, image placement, paragraph alignment, and so on. AbiWord? even allows inserting tables, splitting the document into columns, and—for what purpose I will never understand—setting the default direction of the paragraph to go from right to left. That is, if I were to type, “The,” it would show, “,ehT”. Maybe it's something to do with other languages. Anyway, it's a fairly clean interface and has some other nifty tools, like word count and spell check and tracking changes. Not too shabby. It definitely deserves to be considered. Sadly, it's not as powerful as OpenOffice?.org Writer (discussed next).
It's shortcomings include lack of .docx support, no inclusion of drawing shapes or lines, and doing funny screen things. For example, when I imported the picture and started wrapping text around it, the program started freaking out by lagging and making all the text disappear while typing. After that point, typing caused the text to flicker. Even before then, some letters would be displayed half on one line of pixels, the other half one line lower or to the side or whatever. The final product was always fine, but I kept thinking I had extra spaces where I didn't.
OpenOffice.org 3 Writer
Yep. OpenOffice? is the supreme ruler of free Office productivity suites, if that's actually what they're called. It can almost replace all of Microsoft Office. Yeah, it has its shortcomings, but here's a quick rundown of the big trifecta: Office = Writer, Excel = Calc, and PowerPoint? = Impress. There's also a database program. I'm going to stick to just Writer, here, though.
Just recently version 3 beta has been made available. This is the version to which I'm referring. It can do one important thing that version 2 never could: open .docx files. Finally. While a piece of software shouldn't have to deal with Microsoft switching around file formats, the whole world uses Microsoft Word. Most of that world won't take time to save things in .doc format. This means alternative word processors must be able to keep pace. Anyway, version 3 will open .docx; however, I have yet to fully test just how perfectly those files are opened. I've seen to problems yet, but I would expect somewhere along the line something unusual will arise and blow up all over the desktop.
The features of Writer continue to impress me. I just learned of the flowchart tool, and I'm loving that. Most everything I ever used in Word 2003 is available in Writer with the exception of comments (such as we use for English 332). EDIT: Comments CAN be inserted. They're called notes and are found under the insert menu. I can, though, slap in text bubbles like on comics. All the rudiments like font, font color, font weight, paragraph alignment, bullets and numbering, spell check, red squiggly line spell check, grammar check, table inclusion, image handling, and so on are there. It's packed full of awesomeness, pretty much. In fact, I have yet to put Word on my main computer because this gets me by wonderfully.
It's a winner.
QJot
This one is pretty minimalistic. QJot has most of the basics. Pretty much, it's a small step up from WordPad?. I think it's primary greatness is the ability to run off a USB/pen/thumb/quick/flash drive. It's more powerful than I initially expected, but it's not going to work to replace Word. It has some strange interpretations of more advanced formatting when opening .doc files. There's no .docx support. It's not really worth keeping around except maybe on a USB drive, if you ask me. Still, it's out there.
Sometime down the road, kOffice might get ported to Windows through this project. There are already other options, though.
There are also a number of online text editors. GoogleDocs, gOffice, and Ajax Write are just a few. I'd recommend testing out Ajax Write just because it's cool. Google Docs is stellar, but you must have an account to use it.
I should admit quickly, here, that I have limited experience with Word 2007. I'm basically assuming it's better than 2003—with which I've had extensive experience—by a little bit, but not really all that much in the end. I could be wrong.
While it's not free, I would like to add another footnote to bring up Kingsoft Office. It's got a 100-day free trial, which is not half-bad. The only reason I want to mention it, though, is that it's a complete and blatant rip-off of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint? 2003. It also works fine with .docx, so I'm pretty impressed with it. If you're still short a good word processor that does comments, might as well take up the free trial for a while, as it actually handles them. Like I say, it's a clone of Microsoft (for $70). Not that you can't just download a 60-day trial of Microsoft Office....
