BETA GNOME Workshop The GNOME office suite, Workshop, is similar in concept to the KDE KOffice. Both are free office suites that tie together open source applications from different sources and use CORBA technology to bind those applications together. We found GNOME Workshop to be in a state of flux but impressive nonetheless. Some of its components, like the GIMP image editor, have a long track record and an extensive feature list. Many of the other components are very new. GNOME Workshop has an unfinished feel to it at the present time. For example, it currently comes with three different word processors. We looked at SourceGear Inc.'s AbiWord. The other two are GWP and Chris Lahey's Go. The version of AbiWord we perused was a late beta, so it is still being improved. We found it to be a capable and compact word processor, and it was a much quicker download than the other word processor packages we reviewed. AbiWord also suffers from a serious lack of document-exchange capabilities. SourceGear has some work to do before AbiSoft will be on the same level as StarOffice, Applixware, or WordPerfect. The GNOME office suite incorporates a host of other components, including the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP), Gnumeric spreadsheet, the Guppi graphing and statistical-analysis package, the GYVE vector drawing package, and a PowerPoint-like presentation program named Achtung. There is also a basic database front end called gnome-db, although it is a bit rough around the edges. Gnome-db is likely to be of more interest to developers working with GNOME Workshop than to the average user. Other end-user applications in the suite include the Dia diagram and flowchart editor, the gnome-pim calendar and address book, the Electric Eyes image viewer, and the Genius scientific calculator. Although not as tightly integrated yet as the other products we've seen, GNOME Workshop seems to be building upon a strong foundation. http//www.gnome.org/gw.html