A very early initial draft of this review was posted on OSNews many months ago. The final version just went live and is about three times as long, now including open source alternatives, as well as a review of the new online word processor solutions.
On non-M_$$ operating systems OO can be installed/downloaded on separated packages OO Writer, Calc, Draw, Help or whatever you need.
OO can run without have Java installed but with some functionality reduced. OO is written mainly in C++.
Only when access something from Tools->Macros will give an error message about missing JRE but StarBasic/Python macros still work.
Why hasn’t Pages been included? Is this review limited to apps running on Windows?
To be fair 14 Word processors have been covered, I’m not even through reading it btw, and includes most I have heard of, and I’ve never heard of pages.
The picture of MS-OOXML specification is worth a look if nothing else.
the strangest thing is “Second rule: be happy with your choice, because statistics show you’re not likely to change.”
I think a lot of old Wordperfect users would disagree with this one.
Pages is the word-processing app that is part of Apple’s iWork. Surely you have heard of iWork?
I too was rather disappointed that Pages was missing from the review since iWork has gotten some great reviews but never in direct comparison to so many other word-processors (and I can’t try it out myself since I don’t have a Mac (yet)).
Looks like the uncomparability of Pages is due to the fact that it is Apple only.
The Apple world is very distant from either Linux or Windows, so I am not surprised to see this happen.
Btw, this review seems to be infact a “Windows Only” review, because KWord, one of the better “second tier” wordprocessors is omitted although AbiWord was tested, which plays in the same league (with Kword coming out first in my opinion
).
Same could be applied to KOffice apps, iWork apps, or others unknown to me. It seems that the author was concentrated in word processors that run on Windows.
KDE4, and with it Koffice 2, has a design aim to be able to run under Windows. It is scheduled for release sometime in the October timeframe this year.
http://www.koffice.org/kword/
http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=KDE4+Windows+Port
Considering that it is free, it should soon be able to run on Windows (and hence become cross-platform), and it’s format is OASIS Opendocument Format, it really should be considered as one of the main contenders, and if not at least one of the second-tier contenders.
http://www.koffice.org/
It certainly has a lot more power than Abiword.
PS: Having said all that, I think all things considered that the comparative review was a pretty fair effort anyway.
Edited 2007-06-15 13:42
KWord is a big missing in this comparative review.
KWord has several problems yet, but has a lot of potential because the framework that all KDE apps share. With more support, it could enter to the big-ones arena.
Edited 2007-06-15 17:11
>>Styles and Formatting dialog cannot be docked. Word processing is all about styles and while OpenOffice.org makes styles very easy, c’mon!
>>
Sure you can. Here’s a screenshot.
http://img227.imageshack.us/img227/3613/clipboard01fw5.jpg
Yeah, I don’t know why he said that. My Styles dialog is always docked.
Holy crap, you’re right. Thanks man. I’ll try to get the editor to correct that mistake.
– (review’s author)
It was nice to finally see WordPerfect compared to Office and OpenOffice.
As a WordPerfect user I always feel like the black sheep of the office users, but I still think it’s better than Office or OpenOffice. However, it never fails that when people decide to compare office programs WordPerfect is always left out. I thought the review was very nice. I can’t say that it’s 100%, but as a WordPerfect user I thought the WordPerfect review was very good.
As for Unicode support in WordPerfect. It isn’t going to happen anytime soon. According to the many reports I’ve read or heard it would take a complete rewrite of WordPerfect to have real Unicode support and Corel doesn’t have the man power to do it. If somebody would come along and make a better WordPerfect (including Reveal Codes) I would switch, but OpenOffice definitely isn’t it. I’m not trying to bash OOo as I keep it around for some features that WordPerfect doesn’t have, but overall I just find it hard to use and lacking in areas I’m use to.
You’re not alone, buddy!
I’ve used WordPerfect for years. (And I’m only 21 years old; we used it in elementary, middle, and high school. We actually learned WP instead of MS Word.) Hell, I still fire up WP 5.1 DOS when I want to get some “real” work done, namely creative writing.
WP on Windows has the best automatic text kerning I’ve seen in a word processor (although it looks nasty on screen at first, until you get used to it). I pretty much could not use MS Word until they introduced that reveal-codes-like feature in Word XP. “Make it Fit” and “Keep Text Together” are probably my next favorite features. Sure, you can do that in other word processors, but it’s a lot easier and more intuitive in WordPerfect. To me, it seems everything in WordPerfect is presented very intuitively and works exactly like you’d expect it to–but that could be because I was “raised” on WP.
I find myself reaching for the help files a lot in MS Word and OO.o, but very seldom in WordPerfect. Frankly, to me, WordPerfect’s help file sucks (and the “HTML Help” in WordPerfect X3 isn’t much better than the older help files), but it’s not too big of a deal for me because I don’t use it often.
If you don’t like the interface, you can always switch to MS Word mode in the workspace manager. When I had a summer job at a big law firm, they used WordPerfect 12 (I think–it could have been 11). All of the other students that “hated” WordPerfect switched to MS Word mode and were happy campers. MS Word was no doubt what they learned in school.
My only complaints with WordPerfect’re the lack of Unicode and ODF support. I keep OO.o around for when I need to work with Cyrillic, Japanese, and ODF documents. OO.o converts ODF to WPD (and vice versa) very well. I’m not all that fond of OO.o because it seems to try to mimick MS Word too much, and I use WP because I don’t like MS Word.
Wow, I just typed a mini-review of WordPerfect. I didn’t mean to do that–I just meant to type a reply agreeing with you.
“the strangest thing is “Second rule: be happy with your choice, because statistics show you’re not likely to change.”
I think a lot of old Wordperfect users would disagree with this one.”
Do you mean that old WordPerfect users will never be happy with using something besides WordPerfect? If yes, I would agree with that.
I would also agree that Corel has done a great job of screwing WordPerfect up. I miss the days (most of them) when WordPerfect was a company. They did mess up thinking that Windows wouldn’t catch on. But then Microsoft did everything they could (hiding APIs from competitors). Not that this has changed at all.
lots of wrong stuff said in this article.. some of the more severe seems to be that they blame openoffice’s slow startup to java, and that they claim abiword doesent contain pdf export. but there are lots more…
Basically, I found the AbiWord review to be garbage.
Not to mention the “corrupt Word docs” issue: IANAL,
but my wife is one, and she frequently encounters docs
that MS-Word claims are too corrupt to read in.
OpenOffice.org does a fairly good job of reading them,
but AbiWord is far better yet.
I’ve personally been two days before a major proposal
deadline and Word claimed the proposal was corrupt.
AbiWord saved our ass — and this was a *big* doc.
The “limited file size” claim in the review is BOGUS.
Basically, I found the AbiWord review to be garbage.
Not to mention the “corrupt Word docs” issue: IANAL,
but my wife is one, and she frequently encounters docs
that MS-Word claims are too corrupt to read in.
OpenOffice.org does a fairly good job of reading them,
but AbiWord is far better yet.
I’ve personally been two days before a major proposal
deadline and Word claimed the proposal was corrupt.
AbiWord saved our ass — and this was a *big* doc.
The “limited file size” claim in the review is BOGUS.
Absolutely true. Here in Korea, I use AbiWord in preference to others because it’s light, responsive and (under KDE) well-interfaced with SCIM/SKIM. So bilingual (English/Korean) documents are really easy.
And some of these documents are large and contain tables of Korean verbs. In no way do I consider AbiWord to be inferior to any other – in fact, I have problems trying to get OOo to perform as well.
I would also agree about AbiWord
My wife was working on a 450+ page chinese document in Abiword on this laptop when it still had 256MB ram. I can’t say it was great, but it wasn’t bad either. Upgrading to 512 made it smooth (linux install).
For work things, in the past I’ve seen abiword have some problems with document change bars. That was middle last year. My co worker keeps a copy of openoffice installed for the “just in case” scenarios.
Funny thing is, we both use Lyx with IEEE style layout for our documentation and ship things out as slick looking pdfs. It’s really a good way to go.
I found the AbiWord review to be pretty dead on — and AbiWord is the wordprocessor of choice on my Xubuntu system. I also have it as a backup on my OS X computers.
I’ve had some problems with garbled docs when I go from AbiWord to Office and vice versa. (Nothing I can’t quickly clean up, but annoying nonetheless.)
That said, I’ve never noticed godawful lagtime in saving or opening 20+ page documents. (I’ve never tried it with a 100+ pager.)
And you are completely right about using AbiWord to save “corrupted” documents. It will open files that nothing else can, and if it can’t, then the file really is toast.
Case in point — right at finals time we had a student come to the computer help desk with a rather battered floppy. (The read/write door was damaged.) We ran our file/repair tools on it and salvaged a lot of data, but word/wordpad/notepad could not open the file she needed most.
AbiWord did. Yeah, it was awful looking and she was going to have to strip out reams of crap characters and spend a long time on formatting it, but hot damn, her paper was salvaged.
We copied everything over to her brand new thumbdrive and sent her off. AbiWord FTW!
Basically, I found the AbiWord review to be garbage.
From the FA
its development has been slower than expected. This is reflected in the lack or features common to other small word processors, such as PDF export, ODF support, and better graphics handling. It will be interesting to see how soon (or if?) AbiWord will support ODF as a native file format.
I have just opened an .odt file in Abiword on my Ubuntu Feisty Compiz desktop (hey I have only had it going in glorious 3D for less than a week). Abiword will handle SVG images with the SVG image loader plugin handling installed. OOo won’t handle SVG graphics.
You can create a PDF file from the print dialog. Did the authors even try Abiword or are they using a version from 2000 or something
That includes Lotus 1-2-3, a very powerful word processor (Lotus WordPro, formerly known as Ami Pro), and a host of other tools.
I’m not sure how the author could miss it…?
http://www-142.ibm.com/software/sw-lotus/products/product2.nsf/wdoc…
Edited 2007-06-15 15:29
Maybe Lotus fell into the third tier that wasn’t covered
Maybe IBM wasn’t a large enough software developer for them to consider. 🙂
One very serious omission is Mellel and Nisus Writer Pro/Express. These are very very good word processors and are geared towards writing technical papers.
Never heard about the other one, but I have seen people praising Nisus Writer Pro/Express precisely because of its capability wrt technical papers. I would like to see it included in that review as well.
what I don’t get is why documents made on diferents version of OO.org such as 2.0 and 2.2 it miss format pages and margin, also same version on diferents O.S (from windows to linux and viceversa for example) it does the same.
I remember GobeProductive from the old BeOS days. Has anybody used the Windows version?
This quote should have been in the first paragraph to save us the time of reading further:
“X was selected as best because of its universal file format in ODF, it’s roadmap, and the fact that it is Open source.”
Features and usability not topmost in selectoin criteria? Why read further!
It depends on your “focus”.
If you want to create a quick document or memo of just one or two pages, print it and then forget about it, then usability possibly is topmost in selection criteria.
If you want an enterprise-wide wordprocessor (normally this would involve support on multiple platforms), which is also capable of development of long complex documents which have a long lifespan, and you are concerned with archiving the document and readability far into the future, then usability (which is really really just ‘convenience’) ranks right down in importance.
Document format openness, open standards compliance (as opposed to de-facto standards), multi-platform support, multi-vendor support of the format and stability in handling large documents are far more important considerations in that case. It also should be said that the more open the format, and the less dependent you are on a single vendor for that format, then the more you own and are in control of your own documents.
As the article itself says: “If ever a maxim fit, one size does not fit all applies accurately to word processors. First rule: Choose your word processor according to your environment and needs, and inherent in that choice is choosing your format.”
If you are keen to spend a fortune on a quick and convenient draft-print-and-forget letter and memo writer with a lock-in single-vendor document format, then go right ahead … it is your money.
Edited 2007-06-16 00:37
Just as a side note, I’d like to mention that word processors are the “little brothers” or real typesetting applications. That’s why they’ve got limited functions, or, to be more precise, other functions than professional applications have. Due to the ugly “Windows” fonts, they do wrong ligatuation (if any), usually wrong hyphenation and introduce errors into the document when spellchecking (especially if you’re using a MICROS~1 product in Germany with autocorrect on input – very funny sometimes).
Allthough word processors allow to seperate between content and form, most users do “microformatting” their texts, which is terrible in general. The author should have elaborated on the ways to use things like formatting templates a bit more, because they make using these class of applications easier – if they are used, of course. 🙂
A personal note: I prefer using LaTeX for nearly all stuff I do (papers, scientific reports, psychological analysis etc.) because formal parameters are met 100% and the document source file does not require any “special” application to be installed – the editor of personal choice is enough. But typesetting still seems to be a professional domain, usually found in educational contexts, sadly…
What would you consider applications like Adobe Framemaker?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FrameMaker
Such a program is specifically intended for the creation and management of very large technical documents, and it’s a far cry from the descriptions of “word processor” and “typesetting application” you use above.
“What would you consider applications like Adobe Framemaker?”
I think I would call this an DTP (desktop publishing) application. Typesetting and DTP have many things in common.
“Such a program is specifically intended for the creation and management of very large technical documents, and it’s a far cry from the descriptions of “word processor” and “typesetting application” you use above.”
Maybe one may see DTP applications as a combination of word processing (WYSIWYG) and typesetting features, because especially the last ones are neccessary here; they give the author the tools to separate form from content, to create templates and to align text document wide, which is very useful if your document is very large, let’s say, a book.
Proper classification isn’t easy in every case, I think, because there are “crossover” applications that do have word processing, typesetting and DTP features.
DTP applications do not aim at the home user, just imagine how expensive they are, not to talk about how you’re supposed to use (to operate) them. Nothing for Joe Q. Sixpack here. If it’s up to oh joy oh market share, they still have a niche market, same as typesetting applications. I won’t speculate about the usage share, I think there are many pirated copies of the (famous?) DTP application you named above around.
As always: Use the right tool. 🙂
I do … at home. Mostly at work, also. My XP desktop running a wide variety of software packages including a couple of powertoys (MSVDM and TweakUI), Cygwin XLiveCD plus several X clients, MS Office, a UTS emulator, Lotus Notes for e-mail, several PuTTY windows, Firefox, a nice news ticker, 3M’s PostIt Notes, and a whole bunch of other stuff stayed up over 100 days before I last booted it.
I had to do that because the PC support people whined at me (their upgrade process happens at Windows boot time) 🙂
On the other hand, I mainly play on Solaris or Unisys mainframe server boxes, so the Windows box is just the window into the real development environment.
Still, I sometimes wish I had a Solaris workstation instead.
Edited 2007-06-19 21:39
The review of ThinkFree Office was unfair because they blamed the slowdown on being “overly Java dependent”. The fact that is uses Java has nothing at all to do with the slowdown. The fact that it is connecting to a Web service to save your document does.
Please, try out the standalone version of ThinkFree Office before you claim it is slow. It is written in Java as well. And it is very responsive and fast. Much more so than OpenOffice for example.
The standalone version of ThinkFree is actually my office package of choice, since it runs on all of my platforms well. It’s the one I use for most of my tasks unless I have specific requirements. It’s the one I use by default whether I am on Windows, Linux, or OS X.
Edited 2007-06-15 21:25
“More so than OpenOffice”
Umm…that’s like saying you’re faster than a snail.
Think of OO “most compatible” but at a price. Namely speed and resources.
where is Mellel, KOffice, Mariner Write, Nissus, Ragtime, (Pages is a bit odd-half WP, half lightweight DTP rather like Swift Publisher) never mind the “lightweights” such as Bean, Xpad, TextWrangler etc.
Then again I expect a Windows user could probably name a dozen more I have never encountered too.
LyX!
“LyX!”
You’re right. LyX has developed into a viable… frontend… to LaTeX, which makes it take advantage of the power of TeX. I intruduced LyX many years ago to a study colleague who needed to write papers and his diploma thesis for psysics – he was happy with it! Including figured made with gnuplot and xfig, printing duplex, exporting PS and PDF, everything as he intended.
Today, LyX can be used with many document classes so it can do more than “just” scientific papers. With the dinbrief document class, you can write letters that do conform to the DIN / ISO standards, which employers like to recognize if you’re writing an application for a job.
Can you imagine how many embarrassing pieces of paper I’ve seen called “application”? Or “diploma thesis”? I don’t think it’s impossible to create appealing documents using word processors, but most people don’t seem to be able to do so, or are just not interested in it. Form and content do have to correspond to each other, at least in professional contexts. LyX helps you here, it does not let you make formal errors, such as creating two column text with spaces, create tables using spaces, creating headlines using font size and bold attribute and so on. It is a great tool if you want to concentrate on content. You don’t need to change font face or size, you just say “This is a headline, first grade” or “This is a paragraph headline” or “This is a quote”. LyX does it right by default.
meh,
I tried LyX for my papers I wrote for my mathematics undergrad (word was just unbearably unproductive)… LyX just was not all there in productivity to me… I prefer straight LaTeX code… it is a lot faster to type when you just need to mark up the text as you type. No taking the hands off the keyboard, etc. It is really not hard to learn at all… for just regular paper writing it is super easy…. just make a template for your header and you can basically just type straight to the end with out adding in any other markups… I got many A’s on papers that were worth a B+ in my opinion because of the beauty of the output from LaTex 🙂
I won’t claim LyX is ideal for everyone. Personally, I use plain LaTeX because it stays out of my way and lets me work. 🙂
“I prefer straight LaTeX code… it is a lot faster to type when you just need to mark up the text as you type. No taking the hands off the keyboard, etc.”
I know, I know… same here, too. But users who want to introduce theirselves to typesetting think they need WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) instead of the standard way of doing things, YAFIYGI (you asked for it, you got it). They need clickityclick and pretty pictures. LyX shows them.
“It is really not hard to learn at all… for just regular paper writing it is super easy…. just make a template for your header and you can basically just type straight to the end with out adding in any other markups…”
Yes, this is the beauty of simplicity. You don’t do any formatting magick – but the result is pretty, clean, and completely acceptable from a formal point of view (margins, spaces, hyphenation, grey values etc.).
LaTeX is not hard to learn, that’s right. In my opinion, it’s even easier than HTML – and HTML is, I assume you agree here, very easy stuff.
“I got many A’s on papers that were worth a B+ in my opinion because of the beauty of the output from LaTex :-)”
Same here, and: I needed less time to create the document than all the “specialists” trying with a MICROS~1 word processor. 🙂
LaTeX’s default fonts are great. No comparison to the stuff “Windows” applications usually produce.
I even got a letter from a district court (Amtsgericht) where I was titulated as a “mister attorney” (Herr Rechtsanwalt) and “defense counsel” (Verteidiger) – just because of the dinbrief class I used to write them. NB: I’m not an attorney at law! Proven: Form beats content. 🙂
I’ve watched my work partner actually use LyX to derive a set of equations for an algorithm.
For him actually seeing the equations output properly and being able to also type them in sanely at the same time is a big bonus.
Edited 2007-06-18 00:27 UTC
I’ve been using MS Office 2007 for the past week or so, and I really like it so far. (I got the license-key-free enterprise edition for 10 euros at my university; obviously though I understand that not everyone has this luxury.) Install time was a bit long and it took a bit of tweaking at first so that it saved in .doc and used the old layout conventions by default (Times New Roman at 12pt instead of Calibri at 11pt, and single-spacing instead of 1.2), but the program starts up quickly and uses only about 50MB RAM, and I find the ribbon refreshing and welcoming to use, since the icons are always accompanied by text so it’s almost always clear exactly what they do. By far my favorite change is that pretty much everything that used to require menu-hunting and convoluted pop-up dialogue boxes is now accessible through simple drop-downs–e.g. page orientation and size, page numbers, forulas, page and table backgrounds–you name it. The original pop-up dialogue boxes are still available by clicking a little link in the corner of the toolbar, but they’re really hardly ever needed. Sure, the new UI take a little getting used to, but it’s just so more elegant and logical…
By far, though, the one feature that made me love Word 2007 off the bat was that I could format tables more easily than I have seen with any other word processor, period. My obsession with this began a couple of months ago when I was trying to make a class assignment schedule for myself using a table, with different classes getting different cell background colors in the table. I tried doing it with Word 2003, WordPerfect and OpenOffice (which was by far the most limited), and ended up using WordPerfect, since it was the only thing that let me apply the formatting easily and use a wide range of colors. But even then, I found out that it had trouble changing the colors of cells that were in the middle of a bunch of different-colored cells–it just didn’t work right, no matter what I tried. Then, as soon as I installed it, I tried the same task in Word 2007. It let me apply a wide range of background colors to absolutely any cells I wanted via a drop down dialogue, and gave me access to even more custom colors with one more mouse click. It also lets me specify aternating light-dark rows of various colors just as easily. And it even has an “eraser” that lets me get rid of the lines between cells (basically the same as my favorite Quattro Pro feature, “Merge cells”) as easily as I might do it with an eraser on a piece of paper. These table formatting features alone were enough to make me a big fan; I can only imagine what other surprise improvements might be in store for me.
Verdict: If you can get MSO2007 cheap like I did, go for it, you won’t regret it! Just remember to save as .doc and use Times New Roman to avoid compatiblity problems!
Okay, why did I get modded down for my review of Office 2007? I’m not an MS fanboy. I usually criticize MS a lot, as a matter of fact–just go look at my comment record. However, I happened to like this product and posted my opinion on it. What on earth did I do to deserve getting modded down??????????????????
MarinerWrite (for Mac) is a wonderful 2nd Tier WP.
This article started as a draft and now we have the complete article, but I encourage the author to keep going and include many of these other applications. It’s an interesting subject and the document could be revised, taking into account reader feedback.Thank you for doing as much as you have to date!
Well… the author clearly has a big porn collection… so a Open picture dialog counts a lot in the review…
Well over a terabyte full, thank you! Is there any other reasons to have a computer other than porn and gaming? (seriously!)
In the atlantis review, the “open picture” screenshot reveils some nice icons of beautiful women.
This article is very relevant to this topic:
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2007/06/14/achieving-openness-a-…
Man, you guys are right on the mark. First, I apologize for not covering other word processors — especially on the GNU/Linux platform. All these were done under Vista using their respective Windows versions. For myself, I find OpenOffice to be faster, smoother, and better rendered in Linux than in Windows.
Moreover, I had to restrict the review to a manageable level. Loading, learning, and working with each word processor takes longer than you’d expect, and at times it’s overwhelming, because after you compare more than 2-3 things, keeping things straight in my head gets exponentially complicated. The DonationCoder.com review is also a lighter, non-traditional review, centered around bullet-point likes and dislikes.
I’m in the process of making the switch from Windows to GNU/Linux and I hope to someday do a review of many of the same word processors on GNU/Linux. As for AbiWord, among three machines running XP and Vista, I could not get it to work well with the documents I’d created.
So thanks for your criticism because I respect OSNews readers a lot, and appreciate you’d take time to respond on a word processor article, of all things.
Edited 2007-06-18 11:09