Kill Microsoft Word
While up in Vermont visiting the folks, I picked up a copy of PC Magazine (my dad gets it and there’s a ton of back issues lying around) and in a September issue, John Dvorak’s column of the week was about why Microsoft should dump Word and start over. 
I have to admit I use Word on occassion (really not that often anymore) and I haven’t been very happy with any version since Office97. In most cases, I’m much happier writing in any of the zillions of text and html editors that are available (and usually cross platform) than trying to fight with Word to get some stupid numbered list to do what I want it to do. I use vi alot and use html editing software most of the time anyway. Sure, I can usually wrestle Word into compliance, but why bother? Word files are proprietary and filled with tons of bloat-crap. You can’t get Word to create a clean text file or html file if you try. The tables feature is nice, but I’m just as happy creating tables in html (I used to use FirstPage2000, then Taco on the Mac and now Adobe GoLive at work), and I’d rather use Excel anyway for tabular data - you can decide to use formulas whenever you want that way, and the formatting is pretty easy in Excel.
Comment posted on 3-19-2005
I’ve been trying AbiWord for some time on the Mac (its at version 2.2.5 at the time of this writing). I have a (.doc) document I’ve been keeping since November where i type in notes on its relative merits as I run across things. Here’s a Copy/paste from it:
This is a test of the Abiword program.
Its really much nicer than that bloated pig OO, but since OO isn’t actually running in native OSX yet, and this is, this is getting used and OO is not. I actually had OO installed for a while, but running it in X Windows is a pain and it took forever to load up! I’d rathar use a word processing app when I need one and not have everything all bundled together. Maybe thats because Im used to working on slower machines? Most of the machines I’ve owned have been :behind the times” in one way or another. I have never bought a “cutting edge” machine.
I certainly starts up faster, man. My only problem is that is seems to bog down after a certain file size. The KtoG rules for example are about 10 pages with graphics and AbiWord took forever to change pages and stuff.
My biggest problem with it so far is the selection doesn’t always seem to select. In that I mean the you can attempt to “click and drag” the mouse to select some text and no “selection block” appears (that inverse character blocked background that signifies that you have selected text)
November 24, 2004
I submitted a bug report to Abisource about the selection issue, and received a response that this was fixed in the 2.2 preview version. I couldn’t find the 2.2 on the site when I first downloaded, but the bugzilla email had a link to it and I’m now typing in that.
There seems to still be a problem with image placement. You can insert an image, and although there are little indicators at the corners and
centers (handles) that you can grab to resize the image, there is no “mouse over” indication as you move over these that you can grab them (with a click and drag motion) and as you do so (anyway) there is no active indication that it is happening (so you can see what size will eventually be)
November 27, 2004
Despite the fact that its slow, its still the best word processor I’ve seen on the MAC so far (I haven’t stolen MS Office yet). I really had no intention of using MS since I don’t really need a word processor anyway, but I have been really underpowered without a spreadsheet. This has led to a so far fruitless search for a good Excel replacement.
November 30, 2004
I now have MS Word X, and one thing I’ve noticed is that the on screen fonts are much better in Abiword. I have to admit its nice to have Excel again though. Also, the KtoG rules word file opens up fine in regular old word.
March 7, 2005
I downloaded 2.2.5 tonight and called up this file. Funny thing was, I had to double click the file in the Finder since I could not open it via the File | open dialouge. For some reason, I got an error message that the file was not valid. I think it might have been because it was last saved in Microsoft Word X. Saving the file seems to take a long time on my 700MHz iBook. A lot longer than you might reasonably expect even a
bloatware program to take for such a task (as long as 4 seconds!). I was able to modify the header (on page 1) to 14px bold font and modify the 2nd and 3rd paragraph to a numbered list and had no problems.