If you’re a worthy geek you don’t want to have to use/install Microsoft Office just to open, edit or view MS Word documents. Or if you’re a spectacular geek like me, you don’t want to run that slow and bloated Office “alternative” *cough!*bull*cough!* Open Office either. So what do you do? You look for the best free light and fluffy alternative you can find, which in this case is Abiword.

Abiword is another one of those open-source cross-platform programs that fulfills a need; in this case a need to not install either MS Office or Open Orifice–er–Open Office.

Abiword can open and save a lot of file formats including Word document formats and the OpenDocument standard. It’s light, trim, easy to use and gets the job done. It’s a full fledged word-processor with quite a lot of bells and whistles, like supporting the sharing and collaboration of documents on the web as well as annotation features found on other expensive word processors.

I’ve used Abiword for a few years, alongside Word and while any other program cannot possibly do everything Word can do, it does so much of what I need that I rarely have to open Word at all.

Another alternative to Word is to upload any Word documents you can’t view or edit to Google Docs, but if you’re a good geek you don’t want to put anything of yours on anyone’s computer but yours. Abiword runs on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Try it and see if you like this free, open source alternative to Word. And please let us know what other programs you use to open/edit/view Word docs on your system.