Koffice 1.3 Released 343
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
RTF (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:been using openoffice (Score:2, Interesting)
Is this Redundant? (Score:3, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
Powerpoint (Score:2, Interesting)
Cross platform = :) (Score:4, Interesting)
he's got a point (Score:1, Interesting)
*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... (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
Haven't tried it yet, but this feature definitely peaks my interest.
Re: my-kingdom-for-a-wordperfect-import-filter (Score:3, Interesting)
Clueless semi-N00B question... (Score:2, Interesting)
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 (Score:3, Interesting)
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 (Score:2, Interesting)
My opinion (Score:1, Interesting)
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?! (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder if the
Re:Too many office choices on Linux now! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Open Office Environment (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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.