"The KOffice team today released the first bug-fix release in their 1.5 series. Critical bugs in KSpread, KWord and Krita were fixed, thanks to the helpful input of our users. We also have updated languages packs. You can read more about it in the press release and the full announcement. A full changelog is also available."
Post a Comment
Member since:
2005-11-13
I have to say I really like KOffice. It is nice that it is small and simple, making it a great companion to something like LaTeX. As far as I see it, anything that needs the features of a suit like MS Office or OO.o, is to big for a word processor anyway. Spread could be better, but I find spreadsheets to be a usability nightmare anyway, so I don't really have an opinion about it.
Member since:
2005-11-16
It's always nice to see KOffice improve, personally I find KOffice a much more interesting product than OpenOffice.
Don't get me wrong, OpenOffice is a very good alternative to MS Office, but it's also very similar to MS Office, and in my opinion that's not always a good thing. I can understand why the UI was designed to be familiar to MS Office users, obviously many people will be switching from Microsoft software, but personally I always found the MS Office UI to be rather bloated and inelegant.
To me KOffice seems cleaner and faster, in particular I find the frame based design of KWord more elegant when laying out more complex documents. KOffice also has the advantage of a consistent look and feel when used on the KDE desktop with other KDE apps. That's something I miss when using a mix of apps written with different toolkits and designed for different DEs. Unfortunately KOffice is still rather immature and has some major flaws, it's a product with a bright future rather than something I'm happy using today.
Member since:
2005-06-29
I don't think the usability of spreadsheets is a real concern... They can't become totally intuitive because they're too complex, too programmable (excel is actually turing equivalent).
I've never heard someone proficient with Excel call it hard to use; so I doubt there are real usability issues here. It's not something you're supposed to be able to "just pickup."
Member since:
2005-06-29
Member since:2005-11-16
I'm much more interested in the feel than the look. Changing the aesthetics to match the DE is pretty trivial, but that doesn't mean that it'll fit in perfectly when it comes to function and usability, changing the details of the UI and how it actually works is very different.
Member since:
2005-11-13
My issue with spreadsheets is not so much that they are difficult to learn, but rather that they are too layout based, I prefer something like MATLAB, in which I can reorganize my code as I like. Having said this, I don't use spreadsheets all that much so perhaps they are more robust than they seem.
Member since:2005-09-21
My issue with spreadsheets is not so much that they are difficult to learn, but rather that they are too layout based, I prefer something like MATLAB
Waaaa? You're comparing a spreadsheet program to a massively complex technical computing program for mathematical analysis? This is way beyond apples and oranges, this is apples and nuclear submarines.
Matlab is absolutely nothing like Excel. Matlab can use excel files as a data source, but anyone using Matlab as a spreadsheet program is crazy.
Member since:2006-05-22
Member since:
2005-11-15
Member since:2005-07-06
And a person that doesn't use linux in order to be considerd l33t will choose something more akin to Abiword/OO/KOffice...
What on EARTH does being a Linux hacker have to do with using KOffice? It's not like it's wrestling with vi for users...Or even competing, for that matter.
Member since:
2005-07-15
Member since:2005-12-09
Take a look at the handbook which is available at http://www.koffice.org/krita/ .
Member since:2005-11-12
Member since:2005-07-06
1st: You are trolling, but I'll bite.
2nd: I'm no expert, but that screenshot looks horribly outdated. The KDE version must be early 3.x.x stuff. While I will concede that it probably should be updated, one should do some checking before trying to do a comparison. It was simple to find this:
http://www.koffice.org/kpresenter/pics/geeks_2005_09.png
3rd: Compare the numbers of people that can run KOffice vs. iWorks - the number is exponentially greater thanks to a number of factors.
4th: Consider the cost of the two.
5th: While I'll admit there's some overlap, I'm not sure the two products are in any way competing. There's the topic of mindshare perhaps, but in reality, KeyNote and KPresenter are meant for different people with different goals.
6th: (Finally done, I promise) What was the point, if not trolling, in posting what you did? Advertising for Apple? If you want to do a true comparison, start by using both programs for a bit, learn some of the features, drawbacks, etc and then write an article. I'm sure some OSN readers would be interested. I'd at least take a gander.
RE[2]: iWorks '06 is far much better
Member since:2005-09-10
Well, I am a FOSS buff, but I think I need to step in and defend some of your points here. I like the interface and feel of KOffice and use it from time to time, but have never been able to switch to it completely and rely only on it. It has been to buggy, crashy, not very feature rich and not very good at importing MS Office files - things that has really mattered for me (and I am in bioscience, not the average MS-homogenious office environment). So far, OOo has been the better solution for me. But the suite is coming along nicely and has does provide a nice GUI workflow environment.
However, the presentation tool is not very nice at the moment. Font rendering is abysmal, slide transitions feel like some old Amiga demo and I have yet to find any nicely coloured and arranged template styles. It is a bit awkward and limiting to work with and does not provide the presenter any helpful runtime presentation guides (like clocks, overview of slides, next slide, slide key points etc), or if there are such features at least I have failed to find and activate them - Apple's Keynote excels here, and is very easy and quick to work with in comparison, and renders much more appealing slides than KOffice, MS Office and OOo. While Kpresenter is fine for an hour or so presentation in class, I would go with Keynote if I had to attract investors. Kpresenter needs heaps of that love that Krita is recieving at the moment to gain on Keynote.
That said, I usually export my KOffice/OOo presentations to pdfs and use the excellent OpenGL python presentation tool KeyJnote over at http://keyjnote.sourceforge.net, which delivers very smooth and subtle transition effects, slide zooming and a very nice slide overview (but alas no presenter guides), but requires your graphics card to have a lot of memory - I can only do 1024x768 or so pixels with my 32MB ATI laptop card.
Anyone know of if any of the Linux office suits are working on implementing support for nonmirrored but coupled screens (the presenter sees some things the audiece does not) so that we can have the presentation guides I mentioned above?
Member since:2006-05-22
Member since:
2005-07-06
http://ariya.blogspot.com/2006/05/accelarated-opengl-based-transiti...
This might interest you.
Member since:
2005-08-18
Member since:
2005-07-07
I think we can expect Koffice 2.0, build on KDE 4 technology, to be a lot better in many aspects - you might even get some of the features you just asked for. Maybe convince yourself or someone else to start working on Kpresenter - with the great tools Qt, KDE4 and Koffice-libs will provide, you can get something going very quick... If you know some C++ 
Member since:
2005-07-06
