AbiWord

AbiWord is a lightweight and open-source application which provides users with a simple means of editing and creating text documents, with support for multiple formats.

You are required to go through a pretty simple and smooth setup process, which does not come bundled with any offers from third-party products. Nonetheless, if you are interested in skipping this step, you can easily download its portable counterpart, called Portable AbiWord.

The user interface is simple and familiar; you will quickly get acquainted with a standard toolbar, format, table, and extra bar. The program is equipped with basic features found in other similar products.

You can create a template document (e.g. business letter, memo, press release, resume, two columns), import styles, revert file to last saved date, change document properties, paste unformatted text, find and replace words, and go to a specified page, line or bookmark.

Aside from that, you can insert a break, header and footer, as well as tables, text boxes, table of contents, symbols, RDF links, mail merge fields, files, pictures or direction markers. The fonts, paragraphs, bullet points and text boxes formats can be altered, while you can also create and modify styles.

It is possible to convert a text to table (or vice versa), highlight RDFs, edit RDF triples, manage collaboration accounts, translate the program's interface into another language, use bidirectional features, shape glyphs and mirror characters.

In addition to that, it is possible to save documents to a custom location using multiple extensions, including DOC, RTF, TXT, EML, ODT, DOCX, SXW, HTML and a proprietary one (ABW, ZABW).

To conclude, AbiWord may not have multiple advanced features which are usually found in other, more popular word processors, yet it is clearly dedicated to first-time or less experienced users. It encloses comprehensive Help contents and the interface is clean, yet it could use some improvements.

The amount of resources it consumes is insignificant and thus, the computer’s performance is not going to be burdened, and we did not come across any hangs or freezes in our tests.

AbiWord is part of these download collections: Create DOCX, Edit ODT, Word Count Tools, Convert ODT