Working with MS Office Word documents in Linux OS

Despite the fact that the amount of users who use Linux and the ones who would like to make a switch to free software is constantly increasing, the great majority of people still deal with Windows OS and the most important programs (MS and other paid ones) they need. For example, MS Office is so popular that it’s hardly possible to find a significant amount of users who don’t work with it at all, though there are a lot of decent (some of them are absolutely free) alternatives to use. Thus all the formats of documents used in Windows apps are so widespread that the first thing which should be taken into account by the developers of alternative software is compatibility.

For justice’ sake we should mention that one of the most important reasons why people don’t use MS Office’s counterparts consists in the fact that they just simply don’t know much about them. But what would you do, if you had the opportunity to use a very multifunctional application that is free of charge? Most likely you would like at least to try this program in order to compare it with MS Office and find out how nice it is. In the given review we are going to discuss the most popular alternatives to MS Office to help you find the one that will correspond to all your needs. But before we go ahead with that let’s see what a word processor is.

A word processor (or document preparation system) represents computer software used for the composition, editing and formatting of any sort of printable material. At the very beginning a word processor referred to a stand-alone office machine, popular in the 1970s and 80s, but nowadays modern word processors represents computer applications with user-friendly interface which provide the opportunity of WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editing; most of them allow users to work not just with text, but images, graphics and tables as well. Here you can learn more about word processors.

As you probably understand Microsoft Office is the most popular and commonly used word processing system, however it’s so expensive that not everybody may afford to buy it, especially home users who rarely need all the functionality it offers. That’s why a lot of people and companies tend to switch MS Office to much more affordable or even free applications which provide very decent functionality. As it was mentioned before we are going to review the best MS Office’s counterparts available on Linux, thus helping you to change your OS without the risk of losing any functionality.

Here are the word processing programs to discuss:

• OpenOffice 3.1
• AbiWord
• KOffice