A master carpenter would neither drive a finishing nail with a sledgehammer nor trim a tabletop with 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.
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 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.
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, sledge-hammery, 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.
AbiWord can save your documents in MS Word’s .doc format. As a bonus, AbiWord…