PRODUCT PROFILE
AbiWord: A Scalpel, Not a Chain Saw

Such a craftsperson needs tools that are small, versatile and cheap.

One such tool -- for writers and anybody who needs to kick out anything from a short memo or letter to a full-length report -- is AbiWord.

Multiple Platforms

This free, open source word processor is available for Windows, Macintosh and Unix computers of just about every variety.

AbiWord loads quickly on my 9-year-old, 233-megahertz Pentium II laptop and even quicker on a more recent 3-gigahertz Pentium 4 desktop.

The world's leading word processor, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Word, is a worthy, if bloated application. Once it buried WordPerfect for good in the 1990s, MS Word had the field to itself for quite a while.

Lots of Costly Features

Over the years, Word acquired feature after feature -- most of which average users never use. And Word continues to cost a lot of money, especially when bundled with Microsoft Office, the Redmond, Wash., company's most giant of cash cows.

It's a cow that keeps on giving milk. Microsoft updates its Office suite every few years and offers users the opportunity to keep up with the latest changes for a not-insignificant fee.

And while the free, open source OpenOffice program has a full- featured word-processing application called OpenOffice Writer, I feel an MS Word-like, sledgehammery, chain-saw-esque weight dragging me down when all I need to do is write this weekly column, a business letter ... OK, I pretty much use AbiWord for everything that needs to look "formatted": bold and italic words, indented paragraphs and the like.

While AbiWord's best feature is its quick loading time, it can do just about everything you'd expect in a word processor -- plus a few things you don't.

Multiple Formats

AbiWord can save your documents in MS Word's .doc format. As a bonus, AbiWord can also convert your documents into Web-friendly HTML and easily shared PDF formats.

It's a great program for any office worker or student. Need to create a multicolumn table or insert a picture in your document? AbiWord can handle it. Inserting page numbers, custom headers and footers, tables of contents, -- most of the things you'd ever really need to do -- can be done quite well in AbiWord.

AbiWord is not 100 percent compatible with MS Word, but in most cases, documents created in Word look just about the same in AbiWord. You can edit the document, save it and send it back to your Word-using coworkers or clients.

For almost all Unix computers, AbiWord is available as an easy-to-install package in your system's repositories.