Application of the Month: KSpread

March's Application of the Month covers KSpread, the spreadsheet program from KOffice. Markus Grob introduces us to using KSpread and we have an interview with its maintainer Laurent Montel. Read it now in
Dutch, English, French, and German.

Dot Categories: 

Comments

by Raphael Langerhorst (not verified)

There is support for comments in KSpread, is that what you mean? You can add a comment to a cell and then you get a small red triangle in the upper right corner. If you place your mouse over the cell the comment is shown like a tooltip.

It might be possible though that comments from Excel sheets are not imported, so that's maybe why you don't see them.

by Mark (not verified)

Yeah I had a further look.

Comments are the feature that I need. They work fine natively, but importing from Excel seems to be missing.

Mark

by anonymous coward (not verified)

it is full of bugs in basic functionality, has poor ms import/export, has an underdocumented/unmaintainable codebase. it won't be used by the broader community. the only way forward is to kde-erize openoffice (already underway) and optimize openoffice. look at how many years koffice has had to develop. where is it? where will it be? it is time to let it go.

since some fanatics are going to accuse me of being a troll, i might as well leave something you can flame me over and so that you can claim that i am mad:

Do you have the time
To listen to me whine
About nothing and everything all at once
I am one of those
melodramtic fools

by Birdy (not verified)

> it is full of bugs in basic functionality
Yes, it has bugs. But since version 1.2 it's usable for me. Crashes didn't happen since 1.3 for me.

> has poor ms import/export
But 1.4 will handle the (in future) much more important OASIS format perfectly.

> unmaintainable codebase
If the codebase were unmaintainable, it wouldn't be possible to build such a big project with so few developers. So I'd say the codebase is _very_ good and one of KOffice's streangths.

> it won't be used by the broader community
Thanks to OASIS this will be no big problem in the future

> optimize openoffice
If you manage to double performance of OOo, KOffice would still be more than twice as fast...

> look at how many years koffice has had to develop. where is it?
Look how few developer worked on it. Where is it?

> where will it be?
Looking at krita, kexi, the progress of the "old" parts and looking at OASIS - I see a shiny future for KOffice.

by jameth (not verified)

"look at how many years koffice has had to develop."

Look at how long OpenOffice has had to develop.

Remember, OpenOffice was StarOffice beforehand. I couldn't find how old it is very easily, aside from the fact that it was a mature product and was releasing a free Linux binary in 1996, so a good bit over ten years old. And, with all that time, OpenOffice is bloated, slow, fairly reliable, and feature-complete to about four-years behind MS-Office.

Now, how old is KOffice? Five years? Six? KOffice is extremely young for an Office Suite, and it has covered huge amounts of ground. It already does more things than most any office suite out there, has good integration through almost all of itself, and is lightning fast. It has been maturing steadily, and there is no reason to doubt it will continue doing so.

by Christian Loose (not verified)

> I couldn't find how old it is very easily, aside from the fact that it was a mature product and was releasing a free Linux binary in 1996, so a good bit over ten years old.

The company was Star Division was founded 1985. The first project was the word processing program Star Writer, which had its first release in 1986.

Star Office 1.0 was released 1992/1993 and it contained StarWriter compact, StarBase 1.0, StarDraw 1.0.

by KAnonymous (not verified)

Even though koffice still has many bugs, it is still a promising office suite. I admit that openoffice is a very good office suite and has so many features that koffice doesn't have, (I also use openoffice to edit complex documents, and I also like to see the progress of OpenOffice.org 2.0), but koffice also has features that openoffice doesn't have, for example KParts. With koffice you can easily preview the content of a document using konqueror, and even you also can preview some simple M$ documents using konqueror. Thanks to KParts technology!

So if someone don't like koffice, just simply don't use it, don't hurt the koffice developers by saying let it go. They have worked very hard to for this project. I'm sure there are many people still love this lightweight office suite. We have freedom to choose our own office suite.