Koffice 1.3 Released

perbert writes "On January 27th, the KDE Project released KOffice 1.3 for Linux and Unix operating systems. KOffice is a free set of office applications that integrate with the award winning KDE desktop. KOffice is a light-weight yet feature rich office solution and provides a variety of filters to interoperate with other popular office suites such as OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office."

This can only be a good thing

[Tim_F]

OpenOffice has sat alone at the top of the Free Office Suite application hill for too long. I have been using this product since its alpha stages, and can say without reservations that it has improved by leaps and bounds. The MS Word import filters are alone worth the price of admission (a quick compile on my Gentoo box). The KDE developpers have for a long time now been light years ahead of their open source counterparts. It's good to see that with this release KOffice will finally gain the recognition that it deserves. And with the forthcoming release of KDE 3.2 next week, what more do you need on your open source desktop?

RTF

[Carnildo]

Do they yet have a functional RTF import? That's the thing I've found missing from entirely too many Linux office suites and word processors.

Re:been using openoffice

[diersing]

Agreed. I rather see the office suite developers of the world unite and improve OpenOffice. Personally, I've never like the KDE Office suite and most distro's include OO as the default.

Is this Redundant?

[mauriatm]

So which should I use? KDE Based OpenOffice [openoffice.org] or KOffice?

Previous versions of KOffice left a lot to be desired. And I was finding OO a bit too sluggish on old computers. Abiword seemed to be pretty decent though.

Speculation

[daeley]

On a Mac OS X note, I'm hoping the speculation is true, that Apple might do with KOffice what it did with Konq/Safari and turn it into the next generation of AppleWorks.

Powerpoint

[Anonymous Coward]

KOffice 1.3's presenter offers much improved support for powerpoint features than previous versions. However, good support for links and enter/exit effects is still lacking. The inability to play powerpoint presentations reliably on anything but powerpoint is keeping us locked to MS Office and Windows.

Cross platform = :)

[stfvon007]

I perfer the Open office because its cross platform, as I have a dual-boot machine(well 5x boot) and though I have MS office (needed to get the formatting perfect for those perfectionist profs that ding you for being 1/16 of an inch off in margins (prof required documents be submitted electronicly in .doc format), and for combinations of drawing+text wich open office still dosnt have good compatability with (the text stays in place while the images get all scrunched so they dont match up at all)Its been getting better but is not perfect.

he's got a point

[Anonymous Coward]

Name one award* Koffice has received.

*Real awards, not "The North Haverbrook Linux Users Group Best Office Suite That Isn't One Of the Other Ones Award"

I don't quite get...

[deitel99]

"Especially the support for Microsoft Word 95 and Microsoft Word 97 documents has become much better."

I'm no expert, but considering OpenOffice can already open these file formats quite well (they are old), why does KOffice lag behind? I can understand difficulty in writing these files, but for reading them it shouldn't be nearly as difficult. They wouldn't have to reverse engineer the formats from scratch; they can simply read using the method from the GPLed OpenOffice code. Why the difference exactly?

KOffice is sweet ready for the Apple picking

[LibrePensador]

Were Apple to do for Koffice what they did for Khtml, and why wouldn't they, the KDE suite of applications would be very much complete.

Koffice, even if it doesn't attract all the attention of OpenOffice, is light-weight and architecturally sound. Koffice 1.3 is almost there, it just needs a little bit of loving care.

If you are convinced that Apple could be interested in Koffice, consider this.

*Qt applications can run natively under OS X.

*The Mac port of OpenOffice is seriously understaffed and very much behind.

* Koffice's code, due to its componentization, is much easier to maintain and to learn.

*It helps Apple maintain its open source credibility, an intangible asset, but one that shouldn't be dismissed.

*It provides a good trump card against Microsoft or at least some leverage to make sure that they continue to put out a Microsoft Office for the Mac.

*It gives Apple greater control over their destiny, which is one of the main reasons why they created Safari.

---Flame retardant suit is on!

pdf read/write support

[esarjeant]

"Also new is the ability to import PDF files into KWord and make changes to the document. Support for Microsoft document- formats has improved as well."

Haven't tried it yet, but this feature definitely peaks my interest.

Re: my-kingdom-for-a-wordperfect-import-filter

[Florian]

Well, KWord has a WordPerfect import filter.

Clueless semi-N00B question...

[Eberlin]

Ok, so I admit it (and continue to do so) -- I run Red Hat 9. Not exactly the KDE-loving distro out there. I feel like I lose out on a lot of the KDE goodness since I don't get a lot of KDE-related apps over RPM (nor APT for RPM).

What method is the easiest, most convenient way to get KDE stuff running on my machine? I always figured compiling from source and solving dependencies would be one of the final options. Not that I haven't done that before...as I try to mangle back some geek cred. I've also heard of an automation process that does the whole source thing but am not sure how well it works)

I'm looking for stuff like K3B, Komba (currently run nautilus:smb but it crawls), the latest KDE itself, Quanta, and maybe I'll try KOffice again (been using OOo 1.0)

I like my KDE but haven't brought myself to procuring downloadable ISOs of KDE-Friendlier distros. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one in this predicament.

Open Office Environment

[Mod Me God]

OO seems to have a foothold in xplatform (critical mass?) support.

But could someone outline the principal benefits of KOffice over OpenOffice or vice versa? In what way are these better than MS office (functionality not price) for an office product implementation?

Having a choice is great, but I'd prefer the best features, and as with all type-2 errors if I don't know what I'm missing, I don't miss it.

Re:Speculation

[Anonymous Coward]

Since KOffice is GPL, they would be forced to open the source code to their entire application. It couldn't be where they take the LGPL KHTML and link things to it, only publishing the changes to the core KHTML. Thus, Linux would benefit from having an "Apple-quality" office suite. Apple is most likely reluctant to pour many hours into GPL code... which others could copy to neutralize the gain on the Apple platform. But even if it did become a standard across PC and Mac, it would be better than having MS control the Mac productivity suite. Then, Apple would be controlling both worlds... similar to iTunes/Quicktime/etc. (of course, a QT port to windows has yet to be seen, and since QT is GPL'd... commercial QT applications must pay for a license. You don't have to buy a license for even MS application development. We really need a LGPL'd QT implementation)

My opinion

[W32.Klez.A]

This is great. Every advancement of Open Source technologies makes me eager for the day that we see Microsoft as just another competitor, rather than a huge beast crushing everything in its path.

I haven't tried it yet, but as far as how things have been going in the Open Source communities, I'm pretty sure I won't be disappointed.

OOo filters?!

[Chordonblue]

Really? Wowsers! When did they do that - is that new to 1.3? Of course, it's not like trying to interoperate with a blinded format like .DOC.

I wonder if the .DOC deconstruction at OOo has in any way assisted other office competitors like KDE in providing filters.

Re:Too many office choices on Linux now!

[grqb]

As a fairly new Linux user, I find that too much choice makes it hard to learn and it's true for lots of other types of software too. I know competition is advantageous and all but I think it would help to focus development on say 2 office choices that were in competition...competition like that between gnome and kde is good.

Re:Open Office Environment

[JabberWokky]

KSpread is fast. Far faster than OOC. It's also smaller. It's a spreadsheet, and there's not much other difference. You can embed KSpread sheets into other KDE apps and view them directly in Konqueror, but you can do that with OO documents as well (there's a kpart plugin for OO.o, although I'm noy 100% certain it's in the main distribution tree or 3rd party).

KWord is fast. WAY faster than OOW. It's also smaller. It is also a completely and totally different type of word processor. OO Writer is more of a MS Word style processor with similar limitations. It is page oriented. KWord is frame oriented, a la Quark and Framemaker. That means it does DTP much more naturally. At the same time it can just give you a repeating frame at the margins and be a pretty typical word processor. Each frame can contain various types of data. The "text" data, aka word processing type stuff, is nicely structured with styles and a style manager. Chapters can be autogenerated, spell check on the fly, and other typical features can be found.

When it comes to a comparison between the two big suites (MS Office, OpenOffice) there are some omissions of features in 1.3 that you might want to be aware of if you do them (stuff like mail merge). Niche office specific tasks. Of course, some of the items like that are missing from OpenOffice as well, and only Word will do. The one that I hear the most complaints about is the lack of a automatic bibliography feature, a la EndNotes. You can, of course, still type them in manually.

KOffice is younger, leaner, and depends on KDElibs for lots of stuff. That means it runs on *nix only... which does include OSX.

--
Evan

Re:KOffice is sweet ready for the Apple picking

[tyrione]

Qt applications are only considered "native" because Apple has caved and renamed the Carbon API as native when, in truth, it's a transitional API that is not the direction of OS X.

Qt would become native if it were written with Objective-C/Cocoa integration, built-in, thus allowing a two-way roadway. Wrapping Qt with Objective-C++ would be a step in the right direction, but so far Qt uses only CARBON.

Apple won't use KOffice other than to study it and from there determine how their own Cocoa Tools may benefit from that experience(s), along-side the AppleWorks past.

Apple should focus on making sure it utilizes a document neutral format, thus XML as it has already done extensively and then provide an API in which pre-existing OSS applications can seemless exchange data while retaining how it operates on the data, uniquely to OS X.

Apple is not in the business of making Operating Systems that make Linux the best choice of Operating Systems, but they aren't in the business of using proprietary data format standards thus extending their past history of isolationism.