SuccessStories
From AbiWiki
Revision as of 02:55, 17 October 2007
AbiWord Success Stories
_Please add your success story about below. The developers mostly get negative feedback because happy users dont have much of a reason to report back—after all, they dont have problems._
_As should also be clear to most people, this project is "funded" by personal time volunteered by the developers. Getting some happy sounds and feedback from the many users who are not having problems with would be a great motivational boost to the developers. So please help - add your story at the end of this page. Dont be shy! We would love to read all about it...._
-- Main.JesperSkov - 27 Jun 2002
Once again the Blue Ant saves the day. This time it was my own bacon lifted out of the frying pan.
I spent a couple hours of editing and merging text from two authors into a single paper. We were using the "Track Changes" feature of MS Word 2002. In retrospect this was a Big Mistake -- after saving the document at lunch, exiting Word, and restarting after lunch Word crashes when trying to open it. After "Recover Document" **all** of our work except the title and opening paragraph is missing.
I downloaded a tool from the internet which promised to be able to recover any word doc. It did recover a bunch of garbled formatting codes. Probably the real text was in there somewhere but I wasnt ready for that level of reconstruction.
Remembering my positive experience with abiword a few weeks ago I decided to give it a try, and what to you know, *abiword retrieved all of the text, up to and including the last edit with about 90% of the formatting intact.* (It didnt like multiple sections with different column settings and numbered headings w/out the numbers).
The file format was RTF. Columns and numbered headings were being used. There may have been some warning -- before saving the last edit and exiting Word some "Accept Changes" operations kept reappearing as not accepted (part of why I chose to exit and restart in the first place). Most of them were formatting changes. So the moral is: if Word starts acting up, save a duplicate copy (as plain text!), and tell the Ant to stand by.
-- Main.MattWilkie - 09 June 2003
A friend called me up in distress yesterday. He had this policy document written in WordPerfect that simply _had_ to be changed. Unfortunately no copies of WP were to be found; MS Word2k would crash and burn when trying to convert the doc, destabilizing his whole system; and all the utilities and tools he could find on the net which promised to "convert any WP file" failed, only extracting the bare text. I tried opening the miscreant text in OpenOffice and was rewarded with resounding silence -- no error message, no text. I might as well have been clicking on stone.
It was time to call in reinforcements. Im happy to report the Blue Ant didnt even break a sweat, revealing the troublesome policies in their exuberant dullness in near perfect form (borders missing; bold, underline, paragraph spacing, etc. preserved) and without complaint. "As easy as breathing", he said as he walked out the door.
-- Main.MattWilkie - 23 Apr 2003
My company is planning to "distribute" as part of our product offering. We love the product and its meet both our short term needs (RTF output) and our long term direction (PDF output).
We build and deliver a enterprise automation solutions to the residential real estate industry. Our customers are the real estate agents, the brokers support staff and their management. There are over 700,000 agent and at least 300,000 additional personnel to whom we market our products (most brokers are not automated so there is a large pool of new users. We have integrated into both our product and education.... Keep up the good work.
-- Paul B. Hill, GURU NETworks, Inc. - 27 Jun 2002
I started a computer science department at an urban school in the U.S. Ive been an avid Linux user for years, and my current setting is the perfect opportunity to advocate open source. I use AbiWord almost exclusively. Though I like OpenOffice, 99% of the time its too bloated. Im in the process of migrating documents in the computer lab --and on the students home and school computers--to AbiWord for ease of transfer and also of economy. Thanks so much for such an excellent product!
-- Main.PaulHam - 14 Oct 2003
Im really satisfied about , but I have no stories to tell you. All what I can say is " Uber Alles".
-- Main.StefanoZanelli -- 28 Jun 2002
is so easy to use. Ive got my mother and some friends using it. Thanks for all the great work!
-- Main.ReneHorn - 01 Jul 2002
Recently, my sister, who barely knows the difference between the enter and the backspace keys, came to borrow my laptop running on debian linux. You can imagine my total astonishment. When I questioned her for a reason for this remarkable act, she told me that she needed to write a very important, and very long, document for school, and that it couldnt go lost, no matter what. She didnt trust Microsoft software, but she trusted what I used. And I use .
Obviously, there were no problems. (and linux) performed flawlessly. This has been my personal experience too. may not have all the features of Word, but at least _it just works_.
-- Main.JoeriSebrechts - 02 Jul 2002
I am currently searching for work, and didnt want to spend $$$ on MS Word just to creat my resume in RTF or Doc format.
So I recently bought Suns S.Office 6.0. The Word Processor is pretty good, except it take quite a while to start. Also, I find myself fighting the "auto fix" features [like on MS Word] and the constant reminders to save in its own format. I decided a simpler WP was needed.
So I then tried a number of free download Office Suites/Word Processors. I wasnt happy with most of them. I wanted a simple MS Word like wordprocessor with the basic features. I then found Abi Word. Finally, a Word Processor with an easy to use and familier interface [unlike the others that try to re-invent the WP interface...] and Abi Word has the right combo of feature that most people need. Thanks so much for the effort and excellent work.
-- Main.RogerM - 26 Jun 2003
Ive just started using Linux for a few weeks and I really wanted to get down and do some real work on Linux, as I was getting sick of going into Windows and use MS Word just to do some reports..Ive tried KWord, but its just darn too bloated for me and it crashes on my system at random intervals, forcing me to stay away from it nearly permanently.
Then I tried Abiword and found out how easy it was to use. I was even surprised that it was able to print right out of the box without configuring anything. I like its usability and simplicity, as it simply makes my job in Linux more easy and fun.
I owe a lot of thanks to you all....youre the best! ^_^
-- Main.RemericoCruz - 21 Nov 2004
From http://bugzilla.abisource.com/show_bug.cgi?id=9978:
Id just like to let you guys know that I think AbiWord is a great idea and to keep up the good work. I purchased a new PC and went to get word processing software (Im an author so its a big deal for me, and no you havent heard of me(yet).) So I go down to my neighborhood Wal-Mart and begin looking for Microsoft Word. None to be found, how odd? Id imagine that would be the first peice of software youd find. Well perhaps its part of a software bundle, indeed. I look at the price tag: $140. Well maybe I should try to find JUST Microsoft Word online somewhere since anything over $20 for a word processor is just outrageous. I go to microsoft.com and have a look around, aha, Microsoft word. So I click on it and after reading the product description find out that its only sold in a software bundle with Office (for one hundred and forty perfectly good dollars.) So I did a quick Yahoo search and stumbled upon AbiWord and lo and behold its like Microsoft Word only doesnt cost a hundred bucks and seems to be created by intelligent people (I do some programming myself so Im not a fan of Microsofts buggy OSs and such) But anyways, long story short: you guys rule and I look forward to helping you make this an even better peice of software if I find any bugs or come up with something to help :)
Sincerely,
Jessie Arr
