Better late than never: “With more than 1500 improvements since the first beta release of the 1.5 series, the KOffice developers invite the user community for the final round of testing of KOffice 1.5 before the first release candidate. Read the full announcement, the changelog, download the release, and give it some real world testing for us!”
Hopefully KOffice will eventually become as good as openoffice…. and be much fatser.
Good to see active development 🙂
and be much fatser.
I hope not.
Edited 2006-03-15 00:47
Why not?
I was talking about performance.
What is the word “fatser”? Do you want KOffice to be more fat then OOo or what?
It’s pretty obvious he missed your first jest at his spelling.
No need to rub it in!
I don’t know about Koffice, I used to have a lot of hopes for it, but it was pretty disappointing to use. I’ll give 1.5 a spin once it’s out and final, maybe it’ll change my mind.
My biggest issue with OO/Koffice/etc isn’t that they are “bad” per-say, just that everybody/everywhere uses MS Office, and until this changes, people are going to be stuck using it in the future. Even the best document conversion tools still don’t get everything quite right. It’s a catch-22 though, nobody is going to stop using MS Office until something can handle their docs perfectly (or switching for monetary reasons I suppose.) I sure hope ODF works out.
Woops
Thats what I call a typo in the wrong place *blush*
To be honest, I doubt we’ll ever get really, really good support for MS file formats, unless we manage to get some funding to pay a dozen full-time developers. And then we’ll find that the game has changed and Microsoft has a new file format that we’re not going to be allowed to implement. It’s a game we cannot win. That said, this release does bring some improvements to our set of filters: powerpoint, illustrator and html filters have improved a lot, as have jpeg, png and tiff for Krita.
As for Krita, I’ve pretty much decided not to bother with trying to support the Photoshop file format any better than I do now. The only public spec available only describes up to version 6. Any later format is closed and would have to be reverse engineered. Instead, I intend to start working on an OpenDocument spec for layered raster images after the 1.5 release.
But there’s still plenty of room for KOffice. You could build a little bit of OpenOffice automation to do conversions to OpenDocument. And my daughters, for instance, use KWord and KPresenter for their school papers and presentations. KWord’s frames are really good for that since they make sure images stay put where they want, instead of moving all over the place as in some other word processors.
“Hopefully KOffice will eventually become as good as openoffice…. and be much fatser.”
It’s already better and faster.
Your joking right?, Koffice compatibility is pretty bad and OO.o is just a better office app all round. You’ll be saying Krita is better than Photoshop next.
“Your joking right?”
No.
“Koffice compatibility is pretty bad and OO.o is just a better office app all round”
Compatibility with what?
“Better office app all round” is pretty vague.
“You’ll be saying Krita is better than Photoshop next.”
I wouldnt know since I have no experience with Photoshop.
“Compatibility with what? ”
I respectfully _agree_ with that. I don’t care and I’m just completely fed up to the neck about how crowds of people judge an office application based on how it reads and writes someone else’s closed format. I don’t give a damn. If I give out documents I either do it in rtf, or pdf and I expect everyone else to do so. Yes, I know sometimes you can’t “force” it, but even if they can’t give you other format, if they hear it enough, maybe they will care in time…
Other than that, KOffice and its apps (kword, kspread, kpresenter, kexi, kivio, karbon, krita, kchart, kformula, kugar, kplato) could just turn out to be the most usable office suite ever, if the pace and quality of development continues. The apps’ modularity, the quite stable and fast behavior and the continuously growing feature set is something I very much like.
All in all, my document processing needs (and requirements) can 90% fulfilled with koffice apps and kile/tex. For the rest there’s always oo.org (and word…).
Then you have not lived and your not a graphic artist are you?
“is pretty vague”
vague?, Better office app all round means it’s better in every sence, what does Koffice offer?. Trying to save as PDF in Kword is very bad, why the hell is it in the print dialog?
OO.o2.2 has intergration in both KDE/GNOME and Windows with the proper file dialog, Koffice is just KDE UI. Microsoft office is great but it’s useless on other platforms and DE’s.
PDF is in the print dialog because it’s there always in every KDE application. Not all the world thinks that’s a stupid place, it seems: it’s where Apple puts their pdf support, too.
“Then you have not lived and your not a graphic artist are you? ”
I fail to see how considering KOffice being good and fast relates to being a graphic artist.
Thanks for asking, but I have lived quite a bit.
“vague?, Better office app all round means it’s better in every sence, what does Koffice offer?. Trying to save as PDF in Kword is very bad, why the hell is it in the print dialog? ”
Now we’re getting somewhere, well, at least a little.
I havent tried to save as PDF but yeah, using the print dialog for that doesnt seem all that logical.
Looking at the other way, what does OO.2 have that KOffice doesnt (and isnt some feature that only 1% of the users know and use).
“OO.2 has intergration in both KDE/GNOME and Windows with the proper file dialog,”
I’m sure that’s nice but I really dont care if it works in Windows. Most people dont use multiple platforms anyway. I am of the opinion that cross-platform consistency is a misguided goal.
“Koffice is just KDE UI.”
Uh? I’m pretty sure that it does a lot more than just draw widgets on screen.
Edited 2006-03-15 12:13
a good point of Koffice is its ease of use. compare OO.o writer’s menu’s for example with Kword’s. and several things are done very nicely in kword. ok, some other things aren’t there. but most stuff is, and the rest will be coming. of course OO.o will get more usable and faster, over time. but looking at the speed of development, i think Koffice will be as powerfull as OO.o before OO.o will be as fast and usable as Koffice.
Koffice compatibility is pretty bad…
Screw compatibility for f–k’s sake…
Well 80% of the world use .doc, your saying Koffice screw s that?. I sometime wonder what you KDE people are on and what world you live in. A office program without proper compatibility with other formats which most use, is about as useful as a inflatable dartboard.
“Screw that” is saying a bit much, but, well, yes, essentially trying to create perfect support for MS file formats is an impossible goal. It would eat up all our time.
But that does not make it useless: there are other uses for an office suite than collaborating on MS Office documents.
Creating new documents, for instance. Writing papers and letters. Preparing a brochure with some illustrations that you’ll be distributing as a pdf file. Managing small projects with a dozen team members. Preparing a presentation yourself. Creating an network map or a flowchart. Calculating the yearly balance sheet for church. Editing, cropping and scaling holiday snaps. Constructing a logo for a blog. Plenty of things for which KOffice works perfectly fine.
I ask this every year, but is there a native way to run Koffice on windows or mac without installing X? the Koffice suite is one of the better ones out there, and Kmail is hands down the best mail client I have ever used. If Kmail were a date, I’d go all the way.
But being a game developer limits my choice of platform pretty significantly. Is there a way to get Koffice goodness to us huddled XP masses?
Not yet… But kdelibs4 already compiles mostly on Windows (and OS X), and the porting of KOffice to Qt4 will start after the first release candidate. That is, in a week. We hope to have a technology preview of KOffice 2.0 ready late this year, and a release eary next year. And those will run on all three platforms that are supported by Qt4: X11, Windows and OS X.
That really is sweet. AFAIK OO.o isn’t too popular on OS X because people need to run it in an X server window and experience some inconveniences as a result. KOffice would have the upper hand here because Qt works quite well on all three platforms.
Would that make KOffice the first OSS Free and 0$ free office suite that works smoothly in all three platforms like it belongs to each?
Although I don’t use Linux any more, I used to really love KOffice, particularly KWord, a really nice word processor that did everything I ever wanted in a word processor, cleanly and quickly.
I think Koffice already is immeasurably better than open office. and when it will run natively on Windows/OSx will easily beat OOo and may even give MSOffice a run for it’s money.
With lot’s of fun templates and clipart, it would be very nice at home.
http://www.kde-files.org is supposed to be the place for templates and cliparts. ATM it’s missing some more content but it’s slowly getting there.
For those of you who don’t know, Microsoft’s Office “formats” are intentionally the most difficult, cryptic, random-seeming file that their teams of people can make it. This is why saving as a word document immediately bloats the file. Rumor has it that the only way that newer versions of office can read the older files is by including the older binaries of the Word executable in the new one. They’re the biggest nightmare money can buy.
That’s why people say screw compatibility. It isn’t from a delusional view of the world, it’s from having fought this well-funded moving target for years. You can pour hundreds of thousands of man-hours into creating near-perfect compatibility for your app, but MS’s next release will break that completely putting you back to square 1.
In general Doc compatibility seems less important than in years past. Everyone and their grandmother can generate PDF files these days. Lots of people are putting data up on websites in wiki format, or other data-sharing server-side apps. And people in general are more savvy / more willing to save as a PDF if you ask. It’s not perfect, but it’s nowhere near where things were in 1997.
PDF files are basically what gets sent to printers, BTW, which is why it shows up on the KDE and Apple Print dialog (even though it probably shouldn’t). You can get a lot of freeware converters which will appear as a printer to your system and will just tweak the formatting to PDF and output to file.
I remember using Koffice and had to use OO.o just to upload my pdf tutorials. Then I found (since I didn’t have a printer) that export PDF was in the print dialog. NO PDF should be in the file menu, since someone was surprised kword even had PDF support after I told them it exported PDF.
Who gives a crap if Apple have it in the print dialog, since when did KDE follow Apples dialogs?. Seems you cannot make a proper discussion when it comes to KDE, we love AmaroK but the UI design is a piece of crap and thats from people who love it.
Edited 2006-03-15 15:41
All I wanted to say is that we’re not the only people in the world who think the print dialog is actually an okay place for this bit of functionality. That’s all… For 2.0 we’ll probably have to put an export to pdf option in the file menu (although, actually, I don’t see why pdf is so special it should have its own toplevel entry in the file menu) just to get rid of this particularly recurrent theme. Although I’m sure we’ll find it’ll be replaced by another bit of “this feature isn’t like OO/MSO — you must change it or your work is crap”.
well, then, let me say – your work isn’t crap. far from it. Koffice lets me create everything i want and need, faster and easier than OO.o. I’m looking forward to 2.0, as i hope some performance issues and esp the font kerning problem in Kword will be fixed by Qt 4.x, but aside from these, i have no problems with Koffice (tough I only use krita, kword and kspread). ow, wait, yeah, i use OO.o for pdf creation. pity OO.o screws up some OpenDocument files.
usabillity-wise, Koffice rules. i just started to use the styles in Kword, and i’m impressed. also the automatic creation of an doc index and the variables work great.
I noticed some compatibility issues between opening a document orignally written in OO with KOffice. This was maybe six or seven months ago. If not already improved, I would like to see this done. OO is nice, but a little big and bloated for my tastes and needs.
We have improved OpenDocument support very significantly in the past six, seven months. Really, really significantly. That’s not to say we’re 100% done — bugfixes and improvements keep coming daily — but we’re pretty good already. And, please, note that OpenOffice doesn’t implement OpenDocument completely nor completely correctly either. Problems (such as with bulletted lists) may also be on their side.
Thanks for the update. The biggest problem I had was footnotes being formated properly. I have always been a Gnome guy, but I have been using Kanotix lately, and I think KDE is slowly growing on me. Keep up the good work.
Does beta 2 fix the braindead File->New dialog? For some wacky reason in beta 1, the new dialog was the same as the open dialog. If one opens a file with file->open, then wants to create a new file and uses file->new, one is presented with a list of recently opened documents. Um, I asked for new?
Why even have to separate menu entries if they use the same widget, and aren’t intelligent enough to use the correct section of said widget based on which menu entry called it?
I haven’t had a chance to try beta 2 yet, so perhaps that is already fixed. I would be a bit surprised though, the introduction of those changes was accompanied by a lot of talk of usability studies, which makes them infallible of course