Installation and Setup

AbiWord installs to around 20MB and although memory usage will depend on how many documents you have open and the complexity of those documents, we found that AbiWord performed close to what OpenOffice Writer can achieve – certainly more lightweight than Microsoft Word.

Ease of Use

At its heart, AbiWord is a no-nonsense word processor program that offers all of the basic document editing tools that most people will require. It provides a feature set that makes it more powerful than most native editing software but less powerful than the commercial rivals from Microsoft and Apple, although this is no bad thing in many respects.

Visually, AbiWord is probably at its weakest. The interface is clean but rather unattractive and it lacks the style many people have gotten used to from more recent office suites. Although style isn’t important to some, the program does look somewhat dated which is a shame considering that underneath the rather generic interface lays a capable word processor.

All of the important factors such as compatibility with Word documents and the ability to export work in a variety formats are included in the program. It’s worth noting that the newest release of AbiWord isn’t compatible with the docx format used in Microsoft Office 2007, although the format itself hasn’t taken off in many cases due to its own incompatibility with previous versions of Office.

AbiWord offers all of the things you should need in any small business or home word processor such as word count, spell check, headers and footers and much more besides. Surprisingly for a free suite there are also templates available with the default installation.

Although its graphical abilities are lacking compared to other office suites and there are a notable amount of advanced features absent, AbiWord makes up for it by being lightweight and completely free.

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Installation and Setup

Notepad++ comes with .zip and .exe setup options, although we advise using the installer rather than unzipping the program yourself. Installation is easy and you can customise which components and plugins to install, although most are selected by default. Due to the small size of the program – Notepad++ installs to around 6 MB – keeping all the plugins installed isn’t really a problem. Notepad++ has been designed with very low CPU usage in mind and its impact on system resources is indeed quite negligible.

Ease of Use

Notepad++ is the type of program you didn’t know you needed until you download it. It improves on the original Notepad in just about every way.

Notepad++ can keep up with a variety of plain text tasks, and is great for making quick edits or writing notes. Features like full zooming, auto complete and bookmarking all make using the program very easy. One of the nicest things about Notepad++ is what it doesn’t include, however. The program makes no attempt to be a fully featured Word replacement or editing software. Instead, it concentrates on a minimal interface, plugin based feature addons and simplicity backed up by some clever features.

One thing Notepad++’s feature set is especially geared towards is coding. The program has full colour-coded support for tons of languages and all the popular ones such as CSS, HTML and C++ are included. This makes it an excellent tool for people who prefer to hand code rather than use expensive editors. The coding options are easy to set up but don’t get in the way of casual users.

Because Notepad++ improves on the original concept of text software while getting nothing wrong at all, it’s impossible not to recommend it to anyone who even occasionally uses a text editing program.

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Installation and Setup

Considering OpenOffice.org 3 is an entire suite of applications, installation can take a while. The program also relies on a larger download than most free software. Compared to Microsoft Office, the installation takes under half the time. You can customise the program to only install the programs you want, so if you know you’ll never need the database software, you can avoid it completely.

Ease of Use

OpenOffice.org is one of those programs you really can’t believe you don’t have to pay any money for. It’s clearly taken much of its design and features from Microsoft’s famous Office 2003 but has removed the price tag, thrown in a few features of its own and even better offers full compatibility between the two applications. Unfortunately there’s not yet any support for Office 2007 file formats which could prove to be a problem in the future.

One of the best things you can say about the suite is that in a few weeks of using the applications, there were very few times we had to look for a feature or search help files in order to use any of the applications. There wasn’t a single time where we honestly needed to fire up Microsoft Office in order to fill some gap that OpenOffice.org couldn’t fill by itself. There were a few occasions where Microsoft’s software did things easier or faster than OpenOffice, but these were few and far between.

Some of the less important features were notably missing from the package. While functional, the interface isn’t aesthetically pleasing, especially to those who are used to the new Office 2007 ‘ribbon’ interface. It also doesn’t come with many different templates or dictionaries but there are plenty of places where you can download what you need, all for free.

OpenOffice.org might not be quite as ‘complete’ as Microsoft Office but once you’ve used the former, it’s hard to justify the price tag for a few extra features and a prettier interface. OpenOffice.org is a must for any Linux user and anyone using Windows and OSX owes it to themselves to give the software a try.

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