The KOffice team is proud to announce KOffice version 1.5. With this release, KOffice starts its ascent into the office suite hall of fame. This version sports OpenDocument as the default file format, accessibility, a new project planning tool KPlato, professional color support and adjustment layers in Krita and the long awaited Kexi 1.0. You can read more about it in the press release and the full announcement. Packages are available for Kubuntu and SUSE.
KOffice was the first to support, and now with 1.5 the second office suite to announce full support for OpenDocument (ODF) as the default file format. With two independent implementations of ODF now available it is now a true industry standard. KOffice 1.5 is therefore the version that lets enterprises and organisations all over the world choose the office suite that fits their needs best.
Great care has been taken to ensure interoperability with other office software that supports OpenDocument, most notably OpenOffice.org. We acknowledge, however, that the ODF support and interoperability is not yet perfect. We hope to be able to quickly identify and fix the incompatibilities that do exist in the upcoming 1.5.1 and 1.5.2 bugfix releases.
KOffice is already the most comprehensive office suite in existence. In addition to the basic productivity applications mentioned above, it also includes a creativity application suite featuring Krita, a paint application with lots of image manipulation features, Karbon, a vector graphics application and Kivio, a flowcharting application. Other components are Kexi, an integrated environment for creating database applications and KPlato, a program for project management.
Comments
There are some strange problems in Ubuntu Breezy, using KDE 3.5.1
I couldnt use karbon at all, and then i couldnt also use krita. There was a problem related to no colourspaces available. You have to run kbuildsycoca manually, and all the problems are gone.
Can this be a problem with the packages ?
Anyway, thanks for the awesome office.
And for those who think that they should concentrate efforts in kword: put a site on the web, get some money, hire a developer and say to him: work with kword, NOW. We all would be benefited (except the developer, i guess).
Hi,
So, how does KOffice's MS Office format (Word, Excel etc.) compared to the ones in OpenOffice 2.0? Are they both using the same? As I understand, OpenOffice 2.0's import converts to OpenDocument - so *in theory* one should be able to use the same import filters. Is this true? Or, is there any plan to do so?
thanks,
Osho
KOffice doesn't aim at supporting MS Office format (and we don't have the ressource to do it, Sun has payed full time developpers to work specificaly on that features for some years to achieve a good support in OOo2).
So the support isn't good.
And yes in theory we could use the same import filter (in fact libwv2 was an effort to do that, but only koffice use it :( ). But OOo2's filter can't be easily extracted to be used in KOffice. So if you really need .doc/.xls and so on, but preffer to use KOffice, then you could still use OOo2 as a converter between MS Office's files and OpenDocument.
Well, libwv2 was an attempt to share .doc filters with Abiword, not OOo. But the Abiword guys then decided to continue using libwv1 and we were left with an incomplete library only KWord was using.
It's quite impossible to extract the OO .doc filters from OO since they are not implemented as filters, but as another kind of native format -- which means OO.o .doc imports directly into its own data structures, instead of going via OpenDocument.
In theory it should be possible to script OOo to convert from .doc to .odt and then feed it to KWord in an unobtrusive (but slooooow) way.
Kspread is killing me. Somewhere in the transition from 1.3 to 1.4 it became ridiculously slow at opening documents, and 1.5 hasn't helped. http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/*checkout*/wcuniverse/priv/units/u... is a .csv containing stats for ships and stations and the like in a space game, and is a file I used to open every day. It weighs in at 319kb, and opens in a couple seconds with kwrite.
With kspread: the window comes up 2 seconds after clicking the file. 50 seconds after that the import dialog appears, where I get to confirm that commas are the separating value. 250 seconds after that it is loaded and ready for action. (all of this is on a 1.4 ghz athlon. No spring chicken, but not a slouch). That's 5 minutes before I can use the file. 1.3 was nowhere near that bad.
I hear rumours of kspread being reworked for 2.0. Please please bring it soon. And please don't continue the trend, but reverse it :(
> It weighs in at 319kb, and opens in a couple seconds with kwrite.
This may be because kwrite do not try to preprocess the file at all.
I recommend you to look at Kexi for the task; the app is designed and optimized for handling large data chunks faster. Kexi uses improved version of the import dialog you know from KSpread: http://kexi-project.org/pics/1.0/csv_import.png. A small benchmark for your file on Kexi 1.1 alpha using the similar hardware:
* loading the preview dialog: <0.5 seconds (just 6 rows were loaded as Kexi detected 116 or so columns in the file)
* importing all the data: ~2 seconds
The drawback in Kexi is that you will not get all editing/formatting features of spreadsheets as the app is relational database environment.
Note that KSpread 2.0 will most likely reuse the optimized CSV import with Kexi.
--
regards,
Jaroslaw Staniek
KOffice/Kexi Team
I've just committed a fix for this. It decreases the loading time for your file from 55 to 3 seconds (after pressing the OK button in the dialog).
We do plan to rewrite many parts of KSpread, aye, and we do hope to solve all those problems that make it very slow for bigger files - time will tell how much successful our efforts will be.
I have noticed one bug? since the upgrade. When I choose cell formating and changes the value from "variable" to "2" Kspread behaves nicely and actually changes precision from variable to 2.
However, when I save ande close the file and opens it again the precision format is "variable" again.
Has anyone else seen this?
(SUSE 10.0, AMD64)
Installed on SuSE 10 Pro, had a bit of truble finding (libgsf-1.13.3-2.2.1.x86_64), but I found it and got everything installed only to receive the error:
koffice (lib kofficecore): WARNING: /opt/kde3/lib64/libkofficeui.so.3: undefined symbol: _ZN9KIconView22contentsDragLeaveEventEP15QDragLeaveEvent
When ever I try to start any office product up.
Any ideas?
You have to update your KDE to 3.5.x first: http://en.opensuse.org/Updating_KDE_and_other_software_via_YaST
Does this release fix bug with overlapping letters, not only on screen but also in Print (preview)? Without it I consider KWord useless.
Example:
http://img225.imageshack.us/my.php?image=snapshot54xa.png