Word processor
Let your inner Shakespeare shine!
The word processor in Calligra Suite is called Words. Unlike the other word processors however, Calligra Words features a sidebar on the right that’s used to tweak the different formatting options on the document, such as inserting comments, or headers and footers, and so on.
Apart from this default sidebar that you can’t dismiss, the application also provides many different elements, called dockers. These include document statistics, add shape and more. Each of these elements takes quite a lot of the space on the screen, leaving precious little for your actual document. Despite excessive and constant resizing of the different dockers, and closing the ones you don’t need, you’ll be left with almost no room to even access the comments field! Because of its vastly different design, the tool isn’t the easiest to work with, especially if you’ve ever worked with a word processor before.
Google Docs enables you to search for topics online, and drag the results into a document, automatically adding citations, but that’s the extent of its USP, aside from being online.
Both LibreOffice Writer and Calligra Words boast of out-of-thebox support for various formats, including Open Document Format and Microsoft Office’s proprietary formats. Unfortunately, both these applications tend to distort the document’s appearance somewhat when working with doc or docx files. Whereas LibreOffice Writer miserably fails, more often than not, to identify text formatting and renders the document quite differently to the original, Calligra Words fares far better. Yet even
Calligra Words sometimes has difficulty with rendering numbered lists, and messes up the margins.
Of all the applications featured in this Roundup, OnlyOffice provides the best support for Microsoft Office formats, and flawlessly opened all the files that we tested. Unlike the other tools, the comments added to a document are displayed on the left, but the interface is otherwise quite similar to the ribbon style on Microsoft Office.
The biggest drawback of WPS Writer is that it doesn’t support Open Document Format (ODF). The FAQ itself explains that the developers might consider adding ODF functionality when they have a larger team of developers, or gather enough users to justify devoting the time and effort that’s required for implementing ODF support. But for now, ODF is in WPS Writer’s pending tray.