LWN.net: KOffice Heads Toward 1.4

LWN has reviewed the recent KOffice 1.4 beta. They look at the existing applications in the suite and the new additions of image editor Krita and database manager Kexi. The conclusion is that "the KOffice 1.4 release will be a significant move forward for KOffice". David Faure has also commented on the file incompatibility (non-subscriber copy) issues mentioned in the article.

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Comments

by foobar (not verified)

This review points a few weaknesses of KSpread 1.3.5. Are they solved in KOffice 1.4 ?

http://software.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/05/05/1538249&tid=152&ti...

by Inge Wallin (not verified)

Well, yes and no.

To make a very long story short, I would like to say that you will see incremental improvements for almost all of the points made in the article, but taken as a stand-alone program KSpread is still behind OOcalc and Gnumeric.

Where KOffice really shines are in these 3 areas:
- its comprehensiveness
- its light weight
- its integration in the KDE environment.

I haven't made a deep investigation of OO.o 2.0 so I could be wrong here, but my impression is that KOffice is the most comprehensive free office suite in
existence. This is of course measured in number of components, not features. :-)

And if I may speculate a bit, I think that the clean codebase of KOffice in comparison to Open Office will allow it to enjoy a quicker development in the future, especially if we can get some more programmers on board.

The big Java debacle won't help to endear them to new developers either, so I believe that KOffice has a very bright future, especially in the light of KDE:s increased popularity from about 40% to 61% as shown in a recent survey.

by Gerd (not verified)

I was quite impressed by krita, but it took so long to generate a version that looks usable.

Small but usable software projects grow fast, ambitous projects that are always 70% never catch up. Well, lazarus and classpath may be exeptions, they reched the critical usable stage recently.