Other Office and Productivity Programs

AbiWord

Program Info

Terminal command	abiword
Program URL	http://www.abisource.com/

When I think of AbiWord, I think of middle child syndrome. AbiWord is like a child who lives in the shadow of its more popular sibling, OpenOffice.org. AbiWord is a great word-processing program. The application is cross-platform, with versions for Windows and Mac OS X as well as Linux. AbiWord meshes well with Word documents, and it also loads OpenOffice, rich-text, Word Perfect, and HTML documents. The quirks when loading other document types with complex formatting are much more prevalent than in OpenOffice, but AbiWord can still edit them and does perfectly fine with basic formatting.

The advanced features in AbiWord are well designed. Document layout options for bullets, tables, and other lists are easy to use. You can use mail merge functions to pull data from lists or databases. AbiWord also uses plug-ins to add extra functionality to the program.

AbiWord is light, fast, and efficient. If you just need basic word processing, see if you like AbiWord better than OpenOffice Writer. You might like the single program's easy usability, compared to installing a whole office suite.

KOffice

Program URL

http://www.koffice.org/

If AbiWord is the less appreciated sibling in the land of Linux office programs, then KOffice is the neglected stepchild that no one pays attention to. There is no good reason to ignore KOffice anymore. Although the suite of programs used to be the pretty face without substance, newer versions of KOffice are catching up with the competition. KOffice includes a whole suite of programs:

• Karbon14, a vector-drawing program

• KChart, a chart-and-diagram program

• Kivio, a flowchart program similar to Visio

• KPresenter, a presentation and slideshow creator

• KSpread, a spreadsheet program

• Kugar, a report generator

• KWord, a word-processing program

The word processor and spreadsheet programs in any office suite are the anchors and most important functions. In KOffice, this is true as well, with KWord (see Figure 8.7) and KSpread being the most mature and usable programs in the group. KWord is unique, in that it is frame based, like Adobe's FrameMaker. This characteristic sets the stage for an interesting feature of the whole KOffice suite. Each program has what KOffice labels as KParts, which means that you can embed any program piece or document in KOffice inside any other KOffice program. So, you can put a spreadsheet inside a word-processing document, and so on.

Figure 8.7. KWord.

KOffice won't be ignored for long because it continues to add new programs to the suite and to improve the current content. KDE will even soon be including an image-manipulation program similar to the GIMP, called Krita.