[Gllug] Office Alternatives

[- Tethys]

On Wed, May 21, 2008 at 12:59 PM, Justin Perreault
<justinperreault at dl-jp.com> wrote:

> Some places suggest Abiword but I have never bothered trying it.

Abiword rocks. Back in the day, it was clear it was going to be a
better option than OO.o (or Star Office as it was back then). But then
Sun released the source, and mostly due to having a massive marketing
budget, they convinced everyone to concentrate their efforts on OO.o,
so we're stuck in the current unpleasant situation.

The fact is that Abiword is small, lightweight, starts almost
instantly, and is more than sufficient for 99% of what most people
want a word processor for. But (and it's a big but) it's currently
lacking some features found in oowriter, and its word compatibility
isn't quite as good. If the developer hours that went towards OO.o had
instead been put towards making Abiword and Gnumeric[1] better, we'd
be in a much better position today. But sadly, they weren't.

Anyway, I'd say give Abiword a go (particularly the recent 2.6.3
release). Hopefully it'll do what you need, but don't expect 100% MS
Word compatibility yet.

Tet

[1] gnumeric has the advantage that it has long been a better
spreadsheet than oocalc, but has dropped behind slightly in terms of
features. Notably, oocalc supports pivot tables where gnumeric
doesn't. But that's coming soon, apparently.
-- 
Perl is like vise grips. You can do anything with it but it is the
wrong tool for every job. -- Bruce Eckel
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