[SC.LUG] Abiword, Gnumeric and Openoffice

[Richard Smedley]

On Wed, 2007-08-01 at 10:06 +0100, Matthew Tolley wrote:
> As a long-standing user of documents and spreadsheets using Openoffice, 
> I have recently moved to Ubuntu and found Abiword and Gnumeric installed 
> as the default programs.

Perhaps this is a recent thing, as OpenOffice.org was
the default in Ubuntu last year - or perhaps you're
using XUbuntu, which ships with these problems. You
can install OpenOffice.org easily enough, through the
Synaptic Package manger, as well as 20,000 other apps,
though you will need to enable the universe & multiverse
repositories to access some of them.

> Do they have any advantages in terms of open-ness? (or any other 
> advantage?). As far as I can tell Openoffice seems far superior from a 
> technical point of view. I like to use open formats wherever possible 
> and know that odt and ods are open formats, while abw, for example, is 
> not known to me.

Recent versions of Abi will also work with ODF/ODT, as well as
abw, doc, etc.
The advantages of Abi (especially the GTK version) and Gnumeric
are memory footprint (low) and speed (high). It's worth having
them on your hard drive for when you need something to fire up
quickly, and save OOo for when you really need its features and
compatibility :-)

 - Richard