Submitted by KOffice 2.2, the office suite for KDE, has been released. New features include import filters for Office 2007 thanks to Nokia, and the return of the Access clone Kexi. With this release, the KOffice team writes, “we are […] at a stage where we think that KOffice can be used for real work by some users”. A full list of changes can be found here.
…for KOffice to really became a Office Suite that we can use in a production enviroment.
Imagine a Office Suite completly integrated with a free and modern Desktop (KDE) that can also run very fast on Gnome and on that one… what’s that? Oh! Windows.
I want the quality of Microsoft Office and the freedom of Open Office. What about you?
Going to try that on a OpenSuse here.
About the only thing that has disappointed me so far with KDE is the fact that it still relies on HAL – they still haven’t moved to upower/udisk yet – I am hoping that maybe KDE 4.6/4.7 that we’ll see the solid backend move to upower/udisk which will provide a better experience both power savings and higher reliability.
The great thing I like about KOffice is that it was designed from the ground up to work with KDE rather than in the case of OpenOffice.org which is an attempt to be everything to everyone and to run on everything thus looking out of place on everything it runs on. KOffice on the other hand integrates into the desktop, uses the system wide services and so on.
AFAIK, Fedora project’s KDE people are working on Devicekit backend. However, Devicekit lacked some necessary features, afair.
Devicekit is dead, there is only udev/upower/udisk. The argument i have read is that they haven’t moved yet because the API still isn’t stable. Such is the frustration when people start off a project with no design plans and simply throw stuff at a wall hoping it’ll stick.
Not to knock Koffice but recent releases of OpenOffice are quite good and fast; and the Go variant is even better.
http://www.go-oo.org
I did used 2.2-beta for production work, just to try it out. 2.0 and 2.1 were not usable, I never managed to open a file without segfault. The good news is, it now work better! Once KOffice 2 will be as stable/compatible as 1.6, I will drop OOo again to use KOffice. The GUI in KOffice2 is be far superior to OpenOffice and Office XP. As good, but different, as Office 2003 and 20{07,10}. The side panel, when filled with the 20% feature you/I use is the best possible UI. You always have access to common features without menu or temporary toolbars that come and go.
It is not yet ready, the font rendering is terrible (really) and support for table, odf and ms office file is not good enough (yet).
i find the kword docker in kword to be annoying and for some reason, it is the only docker that cant be completely removed/hidden. Anybody know why this is so?
Why ain’t that buntch of mediocre aplications dead yet?
A big waste of resources.
Its much easier to adobt than MS Office 2007-10.
MS lost it when they added ribbions and the rest of
the junk. Keeping the interface easy and familar is the way to go.
Ribbons are nice and their implementation is very good. It needs a bit of learning but it is very easy once we we learn a bit. Also for those who say ribbon takes away screen real estate, there is a nice feature of adding some icons to the titlebar, even some sub-sections of a ribbon as small icon. then minimize the ribbon. Please use it for sometime till you get a hang of it and you wont be able to use menu+toobar.
I really wish KDE people implement their menu + toolbar using the D-Bus + plasma embedded in the main window. This will help implement MacOS style menubar on top also. After its all about choice and D-Bud+plasma will definitely give it to us.
We are working on that (dbus part)
Edited 2010-05-31 05:07 UTC
WOW… This is cool… When can we expect a blog on how it works
. Will it be part of freedesktop.org? I am quite interested in finding how well it mixes with the existing stuff and how much work is it for the app developers to support this?
Look for Aurelien Gateau blog. I work on it too, but I don’t blog a lot.
> you wont be able to use menu+toobar.
Well, that’s something bad. We don’t want this.
Microsoft, yes, of course!
I love how they’ve done the interface. instead of wasting the precious vertical space with more toolbars, or even worse with ribbon, they celeverly put the tolls where there is a lot of space, to the sides. In I love how you can simply detach those tool groups and mover them anywhere you wan. I also like it a lot that this is much ligther and leaner than OpenOffice.org and it integrated into the desktop much better. Definitely an office suite to watch. Oh and thanks to Kexi (databases) and Plato (project management) authors for providing these much needed apps. The only component I miss now is some app for flowcharting and then KOffice would be almost perfect for me.
Kivio is the KOffice application for flowcharts.
http://www.koffice.org/kivio/
Unfortunately, it has suffered through lack of developers.
Great to see koffice 2,x shape up- it really is potentially one of the most important suites of FLOSS there is so its sad it has so few developers.
Its so important as it remains the only complete, free alternative to OOo, MSO, Google Docs etc. and it isn’t the definition of bloated like OOo, so its kind of awkward the gnumeric is the best FLOSS speadsheet and isn’t part of either major FLOSS office suite- shame!
I am more excited about when this means for Haiku users, who can now work with MSO docs now too, not having the choice of using OOo for that. Or at least they will be able to when its port gets updated.
It seems to me to be faster and lighter weight than open office. However, its not as good at interpreting MS office documents open xml or legacy formats.
I’m also more of a consumer of documentation others have already produced than a producer of high quality docs. I really don’t mind when something is the wrong font for the display is slightly different. For other people those sort of things are deal breakers.
You should install ODF plugin for Okular, it is better for reading documents, you can add bookmarks and annotations share with multiple peoples without affecting the document.
Well, actually, I think we might be better than OOo at interpreting the Office 2007 documents now, and our Office 2000/2003 support has improved with over a thousand fixes for kspread, kpresenter and kword. There’s been a lot of improvement since 2.1 🙂
I’ve been using the release candidate for a while. All I can say, is that it isn’t as good for the documents I work with. But, I really do prefer the interface and the quick responsiveness of Koffice. Its my first choice to create and edit documents with. As it improves, I’ll end up using Open office less and less.
Edited 2010-05-30 23:19 UTC
Does Koffice have heavy indexing issues? If not, i’ll change to it in a heartbeat. I dislike the way openoffice constantly wants to hog resources on random indexing
Indexing? What would KOffice have to index?
Answering my own question from the Meego thread, KOffice 2.2 seems to be available now as a backport for Kubuntu Lucid.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/lucid-backports/+bug/586879
http://www.kubuntu.org/news/koffice-2.2
Hmmm. I will have to find out about how exactly to go about enabling “Unsupported Updates”.
PS: Here we go:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Repositories/Kubuntu
As would be expected, KOffice 2.2 is also available for Arch Linux:
http://www.archlinux.org/packages/?sort=-last_update&arch=&repo=&q=…
I cannot speak for other distributions.