Abiword Review

Like many who use word processors day in and day out, I had become tired of the useless bloat and the constant travels through endless menus to find basic features. I was about to give up and switch to wordpad but that was before I discovered AbiWord.

AbiWord is a free open source word processor, it runs on a variety of platforms including Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. I have tested it on Linux and Windows and it works very well on both.

Download and Installation

AbiWord has a clean and easy to use website, and downloading AbiWord is a breeze. Downloading the 5MB file only takes a few seconds on my connection and is certainly a doable download on dialup.

Installation was quick and simple; there was nothing anyone should have any problems with. It took about a minute to install and then it was on my computer ready for action.

Features

Though AbiWord is small in size and does not have the bloat of other word processors, it still has everything most people need. It even has some features that some commercial word processors lack.

One of my favorite features is that the size of the text is dynamically based on the size of the window. This eliminates the painful horizontal scrolling that occurs with some poorly formatted documents and it always keeps the text at a size that is readable. In case you were worried, this does not affect the size of text during printing and you can preview how it will look before actually printing the document.

Tables are a very important part of a complete word processor and AbiWord supports them very well. While there may be some hidden table features in the other word processing programs that may be useful to some and not present in AbiWord, AbiWord had all of the table features I need.

AbiWord also has the standard word processing features like mail merge, spelling checker, word counter, and revisions. It also has a plug-in interface so you can add more functionality at your choosing. One such plug-in you might want is the Grammar checker. You can download this at AbiWord’s plug-in matrix site.

Support of external file types

I tried importing several word documents and they all displayed correctly with the formatting intact. While macros and other advanced Word features will likely not work properly, most documents will load as written. AbiWord also supports OpenOffice.org documents , Word Perfect documents, RTF, and a few other formats.

Interface

The interface is well organized, clean, and fast. There are no three-level deep menus and everything is at your finger-tips. I would say that you can get to most of the functions in AbiWord is three clicks.

There are some elements of the interface which may be confusing. I found the toolbar that has the Bold, Italic, and Underline functions to be a little difficult to understand at first. Here you can see what I am talking about:

Conclusion

AbiWord is a great word processor and my word processor of choice. It is fast, stable, and has all of the features that I need. I recommend that you try AbiWord out, it may be just what you are looking for.

You can download Abiword at AbiWord.com. It’s a free and quick download, you should try it yourself and see if it fits your needs.

Abiword Screenshot

Click the thumbnail for a larger view.