Abiword + Gnumeric + Dia (formerly GNOME Office) Review

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Review of Abiword + Gnumeric + Dia (formerly GNOME Office) powered by the Slant community.

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Pros

Pro
Lightweight

Both AbiWord & Gnumeric are designed with low resource consumption in mind. As such they are great applications for older computers.

Pro
Great import/export features

Pro
Free and open-source

Pro
Straight forward

'Old' style menu structure is lovely to support users.

Pro
Multilingual

Over 30 languages are supported.

Pro
Collaborative editing

Abiword is able to edit online collaborative documents.

Cons

Con
Almost abandoned

Very few updates and bug fixes.

Con
Default format is only readable with Gnumeric

Gnumeric is able to read/write a lot of file formats including ODS, XLS, XLSX, but it's default .gnumeric format is only readable with Gnumeric.

Con
AbiWord has a dated aesthetic

The interface hasn't had a facelift since it's inception in 1998.

Con
File interchangability

You may like it or not, but this is an O365 dominated world. And at some time you will need to send somebody the result of your work digitally. Then not being able to share a compatible file format is a pain. Even if your application is great and light (which it is).