Excellent free alternative to Microsoft Word or Works

[BigBlueGA]

Just wanted to share this...

MS Office is way too expensive, and too much of a headache to comply with their new product activation crap, so I set out in search of the better word processor to replace Microsoft Word and our antiquated Microsoft Works.

I found AbiWord, which is an open source alternative to Word... it is very similar to it, so it is not hard to switch over at all, and best of all it's free, even for commercial use. Another great thing about this is that it is multi-platform, meaning that it can be run on Macintosh, Windows, and Linux computers, and the files can be transferred among different operating systems without a problem. Also I liked the fact that it only weighs in at 3.3 megabytes, which is WAY less than any of the proprietary word processor packages, and seems pretty system resource friendly.

You can download it at http://www.abiword.com


Now if I can just find a good database program to replace Access...

 

[EDWARD BERRY]

IF you have Access I do not know of one better.

If you don't, the old DOS version of PCFILE and the new Windows version is not too bad.

Ed in arkansas.

 

[Sooner Mike]

I love MS Access, use it every day. Is there an alternative to this program?

 

[Anonymous]

Do any of the above support calculating tables, including NPV, SUM, AVE, etc.?

I will stick to my old Word Perfect until then. And having both, I can safely say Quattro Pro is at least as good, if not a better, spreadsheet as Excel.

The old Word Star program was a cheap but good word processor. Don't know if it still exists.
ter

 

[BigBlueGA]

Unfortunately, AbiWord doesn't support that yet, but it is in their plans for future versions (it is priority #1 on their enhancements list).

I would think that Word would support it. I know for a fact that Works supported it, I used to use it for commercial appraisals, but I haven't done one in quite a while...