The State of KOffice

When was the last time you took a look at KOffice, KDE's native office suite? This article looks at the good, and the bad, in the latest version of the 1.3 series. Although OpenOffice.org grabs most of the limelight KOffice has been steadily improving, with a low memory footprint and tight integration with Konqueror you might find useful.

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Comments

by Benjamin Meyer (not verified)

Is that a chinken and a egg problem? If KOffice is released with KDE it will get more developers, but it can't be released with KDE because it doesn't have enough developers.

by Nicolas Goutte (not verified)

Yes, it can be seen so too.

Have a nice day!

by Nicolas Goutte (not verified)

KOffice was in KDE at KDE 2.x times or so. Despite that it had little attention. (It got a little better when it was split of KDE to get its own timeline.)

For example, it would be useless to release a new KOffice with KDE 3.3, as the OASIS porting is not finished and it would still not solve main problems that Qt4 is supposed to help to solve (as Qt4 is supposed to be designed as such.)

Have a nice day!

by David (not verified)

KWord is pretty easy to use and KSpread is one of the most usable spreadsheet apps I've seen. Everything is just - there. I've seen someone who had never even seen KSpread before in their lives select some cells, click on Data and sort them as if they had done it for years. That never happened with Calc or Excel. Yes, I know KOffice still needs development and that some things in KWord, KSpread and the main applications make it a bit iffy to use full time but you can't knock what is currently there.

However, has anyone took a look at what is in it as a whole? There is Kivio (which I think is a killer app personally), Kugar for reporting and Kexi looks as if it is coming along nicely. Yes, I know some people criticize Kexi, mostly for the way it is developed, but functionally you can't argue with it.

When everyone is disappearing into hole of hype over open source software, KDE never ceases to amaze me in terms of the ordinary, mundane, sometimes boring, common sense functionality there is. Critically, it is the sort of boring stuff that everyone needs.

All it needs now is time, developers and perhaps a bit of investment :).

For a long time I've been choosing KOffice over OpenOffice... OpenOffice makes my computer seem 10 year old in term of speeds and the ui is too complex.
I think KOffice is a great set of apps, specially, KWord and KSpread (the two most used by me).
So, please, KOffice developers, go on developing, you are doing a great job!!!!

by hein (not verified)

When will KOffice switch to OpenOffice-Formats? this will make life a lot easier as the Openoffice transformation filter of Wordfiles can be used.

by Christian Loose (not verified)

Take a look at the feature plan for KOffice 1.4 (especially the in progress section):
http://developer.kde.org/development-versions/koffice-features.html

by Nicolas Goutte (not verified)

Well, if you only want the OpenOffice Writer format and not OASIS, I suggest that you look at KOffice 1.3.2 (in process of being released.)

It is perhaps not the native format, but the OOWriter to KWord filter is getting better (mostly backports from CVS HEAD.)

Have a nice day!

by martin runde (not verified)

Is there something like video editing software for Linux/KDE?n Or a software that supports something like Flash?

by anonymous (not verified)

gg: "kde video editing"

by Casey (not verified)

I did exactly that, and this was the first result! :P

Kspread: I don't recognise the negatives you mention. I've got no idea what a pivot table is for (has anyone?) but for your intro I might have thought this was a troll... Similarly, on rehearsing timings I'm in government and I get to sit through a lot of presentations. I'm adapting Andrew Lang's comment on statistics "he used presentations as a drunk uses a lamp post - for support rather than illumination"

Generally I think charting from spreadsheets is p..s poor, particularly the difficulty of producing real y= f(x) type graphs

Personally, I think for complicated stuff stick to a database

KOffice: I was pleasantly surprised when I last opened an MS Word doc on my SUSE desktop: KOffice sprung into life and worked (though when I opened a complicated/long one it screwed- but I'm confident that given time things will improve). It is also getting quite good at editing pdf files - a useful and unmentioned feature. I don't think it generates contents pages and I remember a million years ago having a word processor thingy including dictionary (wordstar?) on one 3.5 inch disc (those were the days) and it generated indexes automatically - a nifty feature

Kvivio - whatever, don't use it, don't know what it's for

Krita - Kolourpaint seems to be moving along faster - perhaps there's room for combining?

Kugar (see above) spare me from generated reports

I particularly like the fact that KOffice follows totally the *nix philosophies (I always know where to find how to generate a pdf, it's in CUPS...)

I contribute by regularly paying for SUSE updates (or is that just KDE?) Not too sure about how to report bugs (never sure it isn't me...)

by Nicolas Goutte (not verified)

As written elsewhere in this discussion, Krita is more complex than Kolourpaint (16 bit deep channels, CYMK...), so of course it is slower to progress.

Have a nice day!

If you think a pivot table is not necessary in an office suite spreadsheet, then you haven't used an office suite.

Charting does not have to be complex. It can be really simple. Sometimes, you do not need a very complicated chart.

The biggest problem with an office suite, is that people generally use very different features. so if you feature set is smaller, it becomes less useful to a lot of people. An office suite needs to have a lot of features, and you cannot run away from that. OOo benefits by being available on a nuber of platforms, which is Koffice's biggest disadvantage. Even Gnumeric is now being ported to windows, because its good to have momentum.