[6] AbiWord supports both basic word processing features such as lists, indents and character formats, and more sophisticated features including tables, styles, page headers and footers, footnotes, templates, multiple views, page columns, spell checking, and grammar checking.

AbiWord generally works similarly to classic versions (pre-Office 2007) of Microsoft Word, as direct ease of migration was a high priority early goal.

AbiWord allows users to share and collaborate on documents in a similar manner to Google Docs, using a system known as GOCollab.

The native file format, .abw, uses XML, so as to mitigate vendor lock-in concerns with respect to interoperability and digital archiving.

[7] Link Grammar is both a theory of syntax and an open source parser which is now developed by the AbiWord project.