I am not sure if the Gnome Office is a complete Office suite or a collection of Office programs, but my opinion is to consider it the latter. The collection consists of programs which use Gnome libraries (that’s why we called it “Gnome Office”) but since they are a collection rather than a “suite”, the integration between the programs can be called “loose”. For the curious, the integration is achieved through the Bonobo technology.
Gnome Office’s main programs are as follows:
- Word processing: AbiWord
- Spreadsheets: GNumeric
- Database: Glom
- Evolution: E-mail and groupware
Let’s examine each application one by one:
AbiWord
If you have used any word processing on any computer before, then possibly you will not face any difficulties working with AbiWord. The interface is pre-Office 2007, which gets you going in no time. All basic formatting -as you would expect- is right in front of you.
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Page layout editing is the same as other word processors. It is easy to work with headings, footnotes, endnotes, tables, bullets, lists, table of contents etc.. The editing is simple, just click-select-format.
A plus goes to AbiWord for having Mail Merge with the default installation. The Mail Merge is powerful because it is not strongly tied to a certain address book format to work. You can select databases or comma separated/tabbed text files, depending on what you have at hand.
Finally, AbiWord offers a working environment for the users who are comfortable with working from the command line. You can convert file formats, print documents and make a lot of things with the commands. A very nice time-saving feature.
AbiWord achieved what many people thought too hard and it has a long way to go. Can you work with AbiWord in a production environment? Yes, you can.
