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KDE GUI Linux Business

Koffice 1.3 Released 343

Posted by michael from the my-kingdom-for-a-wordperfect-import-filter dept.
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."
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Koffice 1.3 Released More

Koffice 1.3 Released

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  • Too many office choices on Linux now! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ChiralSoftware ( 743411 ) <info@chiralsoftware.net> on Tuesday January 27, 2004 @04:46PM (#8104683) Homepage
    Let's see, OpenOffice, Textmaker, Microsoft Office, KOffice, Kingsoft... what else? It seems that there are now more office choices for Linux than for Windows. Fortunately all except Microsoft Office seem to be moving towards the StarOffice XML format so we can have one file format that works on all of them.

    • Cross platform = :) (Score:4, Interesting)

      by stfvon007 ( 632997 ) <enigmar007.yahoo@com> on Tuesday January 27, 2004 @04:53PM (#8104800) Journal
      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.
    • 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.

  • This can only be a good thing (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Tim_F ( 12524 ) on Tuesday January 27, 2004 @04:47PM (#8104698)
    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?
    • Oh sure. When people use or try to improve GNOME, they are flamed because KDE is obviously superior and has won the competition. Yet KDE fans are supposed to support KOffice when clearly OpenOffice.org has won that competition.

      FANatics...

      • OpenOffice.org won? Not in all areas. I find kWord works much better than the openOffice product for my personal use. Not perfect, but I prefered it. I learned FrameMaker though, and kWord is designed more like that, so that explains a lot.

        I have openOffice, it does a better job of MSword importing (as of the last version...), but it is slow on my old system, and "doesn't feel right". However as I havn't used it much I don't really have a valid opinion.

        kOffice is very nice. It might not be as

      • Re:This can only be a good thing (Score:4, Informative)

        by jrcamp ( 150032 ) on Tuesday January 27, 2004 @06:30PM (#8105995)
        OpenOffice has nothing to do with GNOME. It doesn't use any of their framework or integrate any more than it does with KDE. So why do GNOME claim it as their flagship office product? Stick with your Gnumeric et al. :)
        • OpenOffice has nothing to do with GNOME. It doesn't use any of their framework or integrate any more than it does with KDE. So why do GNOME claim it as their flagship office product? Stick with your Gnumeric et al. :)

          Maybe because it does the job well and they didn't have to reinvent the wheel? Still, I agree that it's good to have choices out there, so the improvements to KOffice are only a Good Thing.
    • The MS Word import filters are alone worth the price of admission

      I would love to see what word documents you're using that don't get completely trashed by OO's conversion from Word. Every version (yes, including 1.1) I try it again, only to find that it can't handle much in the way of embedded stuff - granted, it's getting better, but not nearly close enough. And the word processor is the best of the bunch, the powerpoint clone isn't even remotely ready for prime time.

      I suppose my point is I would like

      • I used to feel the same way, but I was absolutely amazed when I upgraded to 1.1. Just for fun, I tried opening a complex Word document. Everything was absolutely perfect. Every equation came out exactly right, the pictures were all correct, the formatting was right, even the images drawn in Word with multiple layers were right.

        I am not suprised that they are still getting some things wrong (as you claim), since it is such a complicated thing to do well, but after seeing how amazing 1.1 was, I have no
        • I am not suprised that they are still getting some things wrong (as you claim), since it is such a complicated thing to do well, but after seeing how amazing 1.1 was, I have no doubt that I will eventually be able to actually use OO interchangably with Word.

          Yeah, I don't want to sound ungrateful to the OO guys, but it's not there - now - for me. I just installed the development version (680), and I might throw some bugs their way.

          Interestingly enough, the version of OO I have on windows does do a much b

  • RTF (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Carnildo ( 712617 ) on Tuesday January 27, 2004 @04:47PM (#8104706) Homepage Journal
    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.
  • Anyone have a .torrent for this? I imagine the server is going to slow down a lot. and to be a little offtopic...how do yo umake .torrents? Perhaps we can just make one? OR is that possible?

  • Is this Redundant? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mauriatm ( 531406 ) on Tuesday January 27, 2004 @04:49PM (#8104731) Homepage
    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.

    • Yes. (Score:2, Redundant)

      by Sheetrock ( 152993 )
      There isn't much point in maintaining what (at best) will become two parallel projects trailing Microsoft Office development.

      OpenOffice is in the lead as far as the feature set goes, and a lot of effort and energy has to go into a project like this. Optimally both teams should pool their resources and work on OpenOffice, given that it's a true cross-platform solution, and turn KOffice into an OpenOffice integration with KDE.

    • If you want a feature complete competitor to MS Office then use oo.o. If you want a well designed, fast, but not yet complete suite to try out, and contribute to the development process, then use koffice.

    • Try both. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Balinares ( 316703 ) on Tuesday January 27, 2004 @05:24PM (#8105187)
      I think their plan is to use OpenOffice as a stopgap, while keeping the work on KOffice. If you want to know, I used to believe that they were being stupid and should throw their technological knowledge at OO, like everybody else... But after actually giving the latest KOffice a try (I like to try stuff for myself, just to know what I'm talking about), I changed my mind.

      I've basically switched to KOffice for my daily use, in fact. It is -NOT- yet as featureful as OO. However, it is so fast, lightweight and efficient (I'm in love with it's layout model) that I'm finding it a somewhat better tool for most of my daily tasks.

      I'm not sure they'll ever be able to really compete with such a large, commercially-backed (by Sun) app as OpenOffice, but I must admit I now find myself darn glad they're trying. It'd be quite unlikely, but I wouldn't put it above them to pull a Konqueror in that market as well. You never know.

      In the meanwhile, it's damn nice to have a KOffice to show to non-geek people -- especially those who won't switch to OO because of its massive weight and slowness. And if they don't manage it, well at least one can hope the competition will prod OO into getting lighter and faster...

      • Re:Try both. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by teslatug ( 543527 ) on Tuesday January 27, 2004 @07:01PM (#8106418)
        One important thing that OOo has and that KOffice will probably never have is the chance to use essentially the same app across different platforms (Win32, Linux, SunOS, etc). It's sort of like Konqueror vs. Mozilla.
        • With the exception of win32 (assuming you don't count kde-cygwin), I could easily see KOffice eventually running everywhere. .. Including Mac OS X, given the recent efforts to get KDE in general up and running on that platform.

          I agree that the OpenOffice developers seem to have cross-platform support much more in hand at this point. I'm assuming that's because there's more ooo developers to spare.

  • KOffice vs Open Office (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 27, 2004 @04:49PM (#8104733)
    I find KO to be more user friendly and less buggy than OO. Too bad it lacks the MS compatibilty of OO for Power Point
  • ...until MS gets their Office XML patents. :|

  • Speculation (Score:5, Interesting)

    by daeley ( 126313 ) * on Tuesday January 27, 2004 @04:51PM (#8104753) Homepage
    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.

    • Re:Speculation (Score:2, Interesting)

      by 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 M

      • Re:Speculation (Score:5, Insightful)

        by LMCBoy ( 185365 ) on Tuesday January 27, 2004 @06:20PM (#8105857) Homepage Journal
        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

        I don't get it. Why are you so keen to allow a corporation to obtain hundreds of man-hours worth of high-quality code written by a volunteer community, and place that code into a proprietary application? The corporation gets a free (as in beer) codebase which they can then market and possibly make huge amounts of cash, while giving nothing back to the community from which they leeched.

        Now, assuming you are not the CEO of the company, why exactly is this a desireable situation again? The above seems like an unequivocally bad deal for the community of developers, and I say, thank goodness the GPL prevents such shenanigans.

        since QT is GPL'd... commercial QT applications must pay for a license

        If people want to profit from code based on the excellent Qt toolkit, why should they not have to pay Trolltech for the privelige of using their excellent toolkit? TT is gracious enough to allow free (beer and speech) usage of Qt for noncommercial uses, and their commercial license fees are by most accounts very reasonable. It isn't as if they are starved for customers.

        You don't have to buy a license for even MS application development

        What the hell are you talking about? Assuming you aren't referring to illegal MS application development, can you please explain this? How do you obtain the MS API, core libraries, and development environment without buying a license to use at least soem flavor of Windows, and probably VB, or another MS-compatible IDE as well?

    • Re:Speculation (Score:4, Informative)

      by Trillan ( 597339 ) on Tuesday January 27, 2004 @05:12PM (#8105057) Homepage Journal

      I found a blog entry [kde.org] on a possible Aqua port, but it doesn't seem to be integrated into the builds yet.

    • Re:Speculation (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Florian ( 2471 ) <cantsin@zedat.fu-berlin.de> on Tuesday January 27, 2004 @06:11PM (#8105753) Homepage
      I doubt that. Apple already has its own presentation program and therefore no use for KPresenter. Despite having greatly processed, KWord still doesn't feel like a production app, has an overally awkward user interface, much inferior import filters to OpenOffice and, at least in the past, insufficient stability. It is therefore not nearly as attractive as the base of a potential "iWord" as KHTML was for Safari. Abiword, which would be an alternative, also lacks reliability and compatibility, and OpenOffice is a monster that Apple would avoid for the same reasons it avoided Mozilla.

      Also, KWord is built on top of KDE's component/toolkit architecture that is a world apart from MacOS X Carbon/Cocoa API. While Qt allows a native port to Aqua, it does not offer a native port to Carbon or Coca, and Apple is unlikely to establish a third desktop API on its platform just for the sake of getting a functionally rather limited word processor that, at the moment, has no dramatic advantage over the old Claris/AppleWorks offering.

      And keep in mind that for Safari, Apple just used the engine (KHTML) of a free program, not the GUI application (konqueror) itself, in the same way it put its own (proprietary) GUI on top of Mach and BSD. From I experience, I doubt that KWord and Abiword are, in their present state, as attractive as "engines" as BSD and KHTML were. If it all, Abiword seems a more likely candidate since it's designed as a cross-plattform application and, quite in opposition to KWord, focuses on getting base functions and usability right before acquiring more nifty/hackerish features such as frame-based page layout and importing PDF files.

      What makes your scenario very unlikely in the end are licensing issues. KOffice and Abiword are GPLed code and thus would require Apple to release any program based on them under the GPL. Which doesn't fit to the company's successful tactics of putting slick, but proprietary GUIs on top BSD- or LPGL-licensed hacker code like BSD and KHTML. A GPLed "iWord" that could be ported back to Linux and even Windows would, unlike the current i-apps, be no exclusive selling point for MacOS X.

      -F

      • They might still have a reason to support it, if only to damage people's dependency on Microsoft products. If the average person were less tied to their MS Office computer they might be a little more inclined to investigate the competition as regards operating systems too.
        I don't say they'll do it, but there might be a little more at stake here than profit.

  • Fun for Gentoo (Score:5, Informative)

    by GweeDo ( 127172 ) on Tuesday January 27, 2004 @04:52PM (#8104776) Homepage
    Get the build here [grebowiec.net]

    Be sure to do: emerge koffice-1.3.ebuild digest

    Then emerge it and enjoy :)

  • Powerpoint (Score:2, Interesting)

    by 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.

  • I don't quite get... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by deitel99 ( 533532 ) on Tuesday January 27, 2004 @04:53PM (#8104805)
    "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?

    • Re:I don't quite get... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Just Some Guy ( 3352 ) <kirk+slashdot@strauser.com> on Tuesday January 27, 2004 @05:21PM (#8105148) Homepage Journal
      My understanding is that it's not so much the file parsing that's difficult, it's fitting the resulting data into your application's object model. The KOffice people may have a good understand of the Office format, but it may not be a perfect fit onto their internal data structures.
      • Bingo. KWord is a frame based word processor, while MSWord/OO.org are page based word processors. Converting the content between the two is fairly trivial, but converting the formatting is a bitch.

        A good analogy is HTML. People convert to and from HTML from within MSWord and think nothing of it. But almost all formatting is lost, as anyone who spends more than two seconds comparing the results can see.

    • Re:I don't quite get... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by not_cub ( 133206 ) <.slashdot-replies. .at. .edparcell.com.> on Tuesday January 27, 2004 @05:24PM (#8105182) Homepage
      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?

      Perhaps reading the files themselves isn't as hard as mapping them onto your own representation of a document. OpenOffice seems to have been reasonably like Office from the time I first saw it around '99 I believe (as StarOffice). KDE is effectively a design from scratch, although various things come out working similarly, because they are reasonable design decisions. As a consequence, even though the open world knows the data format of Word files to a large extent, reading them into KOffice is still hard.

      This wild guess bought to you by not_cub.

    • Found the information a while back on dot.kde.org (can't find the link though, sorry).

      The thing is that OO's input filters apparently load files directly into its memory structures, without an intermediate API. This makes it highly difficult for other projects to use them directly. So the best they can do is peek and poke at OO's code, try to understand what it does and why, and then use it in their own filter -- which they actually export as a library (libwv2) so that other projects can make use of it.

      I
  • Koffice 1.3 ebuild [grebowiec.net]

    be sure to do: emerge koffice-1.3.ebuild digest

    Then build build build away!

  • KOffice for OS X still moving forward (Score:5, Informative)

    by abischof ( 255 ) * <alex.spamcop@net> on Tuesday January 27, 2004 @04:55PM (#8104831) Homepage
    And, don't forget that Ranger Rick [befunk.com] is still working on porting KOffice to OS X [slashdot.org]. There are now binaries available [opendarwin.org] and if you're going to download all the KDE-on-OSX packages, you may as well use the all-packages torrent [opendarwin.org].

  • KOffice is sweet ready for the Apple picking (Score:5, Interesting)

    by LibrePensador ( 668335 ) on Tuesday January 27, 2004 @04:56PM (#8104851) Journal
    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!

    • Re:KOffice is sweet ready for the Apple picking (Score:4, Interesting)

      by tyrione ( 134248 ) on Tuesday January 27, 2004 @05:53PM (#8105543) Homepage

      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.

    • Were Apple to do for Koffice what they did for Khtml, and why wouldn't they

      As one poster already pointed out earlier, KHTML is LGPL, but KOffice is not. So Apple can't take the core of KOffice and build their own stuff around it without releasing it all under the GPL. With KHTML, they only released the changes to KHTML, but not the stuff built on top of it.

  • Lightweight ? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by koh ( 124962 )
    And what exactly do you call a "lightweight" office suite ?

    Any office suite without the clippy thing ? ;)

  • pdf read/write support (Score:5, Interesting)

    by esarjeant ( 100503 ) on Tuesday January 27, 2004 @04:57PM (#8104862) Homepage
    "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.
    • Interesting. I just tried this feature, and unfortunately it completely messed up the layout of the two PDFs I tried it on. However, it did successfully import the text and pictures from both documents. It is unlikely that this feature will let you easily edit and re-save a PDF file, but it could be useful for extracting text and images from them.

      KWord's MS Word filters have improved, but they still have a ways to go as well. I tried importing my resume, and found that the import filter doesn't suppor

  • So how good are the word import filters?

    I deal with a huge variety of word docs every day and any dev team that asks i can send the ones that barf, but I'm yet to have any of them take up my offer.

  • Re: my-kingdom-for-a-wordperfect-import-filter (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Florian ( 2471 ) <cantsin@zedat.fu-berlin.de> on Tuesday January 27, 2004 @04:58PM (#8104881) Homepage
    Well, KWord has a WordPerfect import filter.

    • and it sucks (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I can't speak to the version of Kword that was released today. But after I read your comment I went and fired up the previous version under Mepis, and loaded in a WP 10 file I've been writing. About one in twenty words lacked a space before the next word. And all curly quotes and apostrophes got transferred over as squares.

      Still, I'm eager to see if the new version has a better import filter. You'd have to be a masochist to use the previous version of Kword to import a lenthy WP file.

  • MS Filters (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Krafty Koder ( 697396 )
    "the support for Microsoft Word 95 and Microsoft Word 97 documents has become much better." Guys (and girls) in the KOffice team - i'm not interested in those formats. I'm a KOffice fan big time, but I want MS Office 2000 filters at the very least. May I suggest that instead of adding features, the team focuses on filters for the next release. I can't understand why this hasnt been done - especially since OpenOffice can do it. I love the speed of KOffice on KDE - but I'm still stuck with OO as a result o

    • Re:MS Filters (Score:3, Informative)

      by Dr.Dubious DDQ ( 11968 )
      I want MS Office 2000 filters at the very least.

      I believe that, supposedly, MS Blahblahblah97 and MS Blahblahblah2000 are effectively the same format. I would have sworn that I'd seen "MS Word 97/2000","MS Excel 97/2000" and so forth as options in some menus. (Even MS Office 2000 itself, perhaps?)

      Granted that I wouldn't really be surprised if there WERE differences, but I hadn't heard that there were.

    • Office 97, 2000 and XP all use the same file format, and can interchange documents seemlessly. Thus Word '97 support is defacto 2000 and XP support also.

      The big changes were 95 to 97, and XP to 2003 (XML).

      The one exception was Access, which changed it's database structure between 97 and 2000.
  • So when is KOffice going to natively use the OpenOffice.org (OASIS?) file format? ... Google came up a little short on this for me.
  • 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 h
    • Probably the easiest way is to back up /home then track down a copy of that debianifier application that was mentioned a few days ago. apt-get install kde/unstable will then be your friend. I suspect it wasn't what you were hoping for though, so:

      Have you checked to see if there are Mandrake or PLD rpms available? Those distributions seem pretty prompt with rpm support for KDE, though I doubt you'll find 3.2beta rpms yet, and often the rpms seem droppable into RedHat distributions.
      Alternatively you could tr
    • Head for kde-redhat.sf.net and enjoy!
  • I have been given 5 points, i used them, then i got them again, sometimes the post count is 0, and as you can see i am replying in a post i already moderated
  • I know I should RTFA, but I am a lazy OS X user (this is a true statement--not flamebait--comprised of two separate but not mutually exlusive facts: I am a Mac OS X user and I am lazy), so my question is:

    Can I get KOffice to run on OS X? What do I need to use? Apple's X11 plus KDE?

    Thanks in advance to anyone who wishes to do my own work and research for me.

  • Open Office Environment (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Mod Me God ( 686647 ) on Tuesday January 27, 2004 @05:11PM (#8105039)
    OO seems to have a foothold in xplatform (critical mass?) support, now a KOffice resurgence.

    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.
    • I'd hate to see either OO or KOffice achieve dominance. Indeed, why would anyone see that as desirable? The goal is to have a common file format, not applications monoculture. We already have that with Microsoft.

      The whole office suite idea is flawed and only serves to line the pockets of commercial office suite producers and to create a winner-takes-all (and user-gets-screwed) environment. If it suits my particular preferences and needs, I ought to be able to run the word processor from KOffice, the spread
    • KOffice:

      Uses KDE environment to full potential, very smooth, fast and clean. Less features than the others last time I looked. Doesn't really handle MS Office docs well yet, again last time I looked.

      OpenOffice

      Multiplatform, full of features, loads Microsoft Office documents quite well. Downside is it is rather large and slow. Occasional quirk, but on the whole rock steady.

      MS Office

      Feature wise, MS Office still rules the roost. But the price there is closed document formats, an untrustworthy compan
  • Presumably we won't see these anytime soon, unless someone is kind enough to volunteer?

  • OOo filters?! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Chordonblue ( 585047 ) on Tuesday January 27, 2004 @05:16PM (#8105098) Journal
    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.

  • ..when we will also get full Mac OS X (using native QT libraries - without X11) support?

    Yes, I know it compiles and runs. But I mean: Production-quality version. Binary packages would be nice, too.

    Any new information about this?

  • So, which one should I use? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Realistic_Dragon ( 655151 ) on Tuesday January 27, 2004 @05:52PM (#8105526) Homepage
    The answer is both, duh.

    The best advantage of OSS software is that you can afford to run all of them. Who could afford to have MS Office and $COMPETITOR at $450 each? On the other hand OOo, KO and GnomeOffice have just cost me a little time and some donations that were my choice to make.

    (IMO the best mix is AbiWord for editing, OO.o for conversion, Sodipodi for graphics... but hell, pick whatever you like.)
  • With out a 'user friendly' database module its still handicapped..

    Regardless of what 'techies' believe, a OSS replacement for MSAccess is still relevant, for the 'average user'.
  • The good thing about Koffice is its speed and simplicity. Click -- bang -- it's open. Typetypetype. Job is done. It's almost as simple as a notepad-type program, but comes with a reasonably complete feature set. Great for 90% of my writing.

    Now that it supposedly handles Star Office's XML format, I'll be more likely to use it. My only reservation before was that documents containing images or tables really needed to be saved in Kword's native format. Since I think of Open Office as my main suite, I was hes

  • I am really cheering on the port to OS X, and I really really hope it'll include the database.

    You have No Idea how popular this could become.

    Please, include a simple mySQL installer and setup wizzard (or better yet, integrate that in the KOffice installer).

    If they succeed, they deserve the world (and maybe a chunk or two of Mars).

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