Working with MS Office Word documents in Linux OS

AbiWord

AbiWord being a free software represents, as you’ve probably understand according to its name, just a word processor. In runs on most popular operating systems, such as: Microsoft Windows, Linux, MacOS, Solaris and others. It should be mentioned that this application can hardly be compared with Microsoft Word and OpenOffice Writer as far as the functionality is concerned, because it supports just the basic word processing features (lists, tables, styles, page header and footers, templates, page columns, spell checking, grammar checking and others. It also has a Presentation View (displaying the document in full screen) that is considered to be its special feature.

Although it’s pretty simple and lacks some complicated features which may be important for advanced users, AbiWord is a very fast word processing program that can be run almost on every computer. Moreover it supports all the formats you may need while working with a word processing system: HTML, Microsoft Word (both .doc and .docx), OpenDocument format (.odt), Rich Text format (.rtf), Text documents (.txt) and others.

Now let’s check the results of the compatibility test. Due to the fact that you’ve already seen the screenshots of the original documents made in Microsoft Office 2007 SP2, it’s unnecessary to post them for the second time; so we go ahead directly with screenshots made in AbiWord.

Here is the screenshot of .doc file with formatted text made in AbiWord:

As you can see it does pretty nice job having only a single issue – the special bullet symbol is replaced with the usual dot symbol.

Here is the screenshot of .docx file with formatted text made in AbiWord:

Decent enough, but here we got two issues:

• The supper case formatting is not displayed
• There is no list at all