“The KOffice team is announced KOffice version 1.5.2. This is mainly a bugfix release but also contains numerous translation updates. Especially KWord, KSpread and Kexi have received critical bug fixes.”
“The KOffice team is announced KOffice version 1.5.2. This is mainly a bugfix release but also contains numerous translation updates. Especially KWord, KSpread and Kexi have received critical bug fixes.”
I haven’t used Koffice in long time but have some curious questions…
Can I do cut-n-paste from other word processors, files, images to Koffice?
How much memory it eats?
How do I send email attachment to my colleague/boss who is using MSWord, without any loss of format?
Does it have menu File–mailto:….
kword won’t export to .doc format. it will export to host of other formats that msword can read but ODF and the older .kwd are the only things that really work well.
although it your just doing pure text its fine problem is that kword is sort of a hybrid desktop publishing software and wordprocessor so it does a lot of formatting that open office doesn’t replicate when you start mixing tables and images with text
Edited 2006-07-14 23:22
> Can I do cut-n-paste from other word processors,
> files, images to Koffice?
Very limited. OOo <=> KOffice:
– plain text works of cource
– rich text => looses some formatting
– tables => garbage
> How much memory it eats?
It depends of what you’re doing.
When I start KWord with an empty document it occupies 28 MB. OOo Writer eats away 56 MB for comparison.
> How do I send email attachment to my
> colleague/boss who is using MSWord,
> without any loss of format?
For simple formatting RTF-Format should do the job. On Windows with MS Office it will be opened with Word by default.
> Does it have menu File–mailto:….
Yes.
Can I do cut-n-paste from other word processors, files, images to Koffice?
Yes
How much memory it eats?
Almost nothing
How do I send email attachment to my colleague/boss who is using MSWord, without any loss of format?
Tell her/him to install OpenOffice.
If you mean: Does Koffice have Ms Word, Excel filters and so on: Yes, but they are not as good as the filters in OOo.
Does it have menu File–mailto:….
Yes, it’s called Send.
“Tell her/him to install OpenOffice.”
Well, that’s not too valid of an excuse, seeing as I’ve read that Koffice’s ODF files don’t display correctly in OOo, and vice-versa.
IMO, MS Office is the best Office suite out there, and the only reason to use alternatives is the price. If this guy had already paid for MS Office, what reason would s/he have to switch?
Also, the cut and paste problem you had is most likely related to a problem with X’s clipboard. Basically, if you copy/cut from a program, and then close the program, the data you copy/cut is lost. To solve the problem, you’ll have to use a clipboard-enhancing app such as Klipper (in KDE) or the Clipboard applet in XFCE. (I haven’t seen one for Gnome as of yet, but I would imagine one exists.)
Edited 2006-07-15 02:27
> IMO, MS Office is the best Office suite out there, and
> the only reason to use alternatives is the price.
What about using a OS where MSO is not available? That’s an important argument for me since I’m writing this post on such a platform.
And if you’re just writing some letters and do some calculations for yourself KOffice will work just fine. I guess it’s good enough for the most work at home that you don’t want to share with other office systems.
> Also, the cut and paste problem you had is most
> likely related to a problem with X’s clipboard.
Not really. You can’t copy nearly anything than plain text between different office systems. You can’t even copy a table from OOo Calc to OOo Base…
I like KOffice. It runs exceptionally better on my old machine (1GHz, 256MB RAM) compared to openoffice and there aren’t any features I miss. Not that I need a lot of features.
Needless to say, better integration with KDE is nice as well.
> kword won’t export to .doc format. it will
> export to host of other formats that msword
> can read but ODF and the older .kwd are the
> only things that really work well.
KWord is able to export to .rtf which is kind of a native format for MS Word and should work fine.
You can export to RTF and save the file name with .DOC extension. When you open it with MS Word it will automatically convert it. RTF is more standard and open than .DOC, so…
The only thing i really like of Koffice is Krita.
Its a very good paint / photo edit program already and even supports CMYK. Something the Gimp is trying to add for years now..
Cheers to the Koffice Team!
Edited 2006-07-15 07:29
It is valid, MS office is the only office-suit that creates a vendor lock-in, as good as it may be(which it definitely is), it should not be supported unless they have native ODF-support.
This is good news. I hope there will be more collaboration between the different Office Suites, especially when it comes to MS Word/Excel/PowerPoint filters. 🙂
What I like on KWOrd is the PDF-import.
That something which OpenOffice.org not even have.
Normally PDF-files are in PDF-vieweres like pictures. The texte in the documents you can not mark and/or copy and such thing which know know from other documents.
But woth KWord and the PDF-import, you can not only mark and copy the text. You can also save pictures in it in the PDF-format. And the pictures are in the original size, which the author of the PDF-file have used, to integrate it in the PDF-document.
And if you want you can modyfy the PDF-file and export it later again to a PDF-file.
Or you can safe it under the ODF-format. Then itrs something you can load in OOo.
theuserbl
The koffice project is going in the right direction and obviously the community invested a lot of work into it. Nonetheless, it still is incredibly buggy and unusable in any semi-serious situation. For example, KSpread’s cell outline configuration is broken and it is even possible to have two adjacent cells with different outline configurations pertraining to the same neighbouring border. In KWord, inserting any image is guaranteed to screw up your entire document and don’t even think about inserting pictures into tables. It isn’t possible. In Kword the tables are also screwed up beyond being remotely usable because they can’t even reach the end of a page without breaking the entire document. Then karbon is still a pathetic tool to produce vector graphics, with too many usability bugs.
I mean, things are looking very promissing with that office package but still, KOffice is very very far away from being usable. It isn’t even worthy of that 1.5 version number. It works and feels more like an alpha release than a 1.5.
Hmm, sounds like a pity :/ Between OpenOffice’s difficult developing, and KOffice’s relative immaturity, I’m getting the impression that it’s going to be a while before a truly good free/open-source office suite emerges.
Incidentally, to head off the “why aren’t you completely happy with OpenOffice?” question, here are my specific complaints:
http://www.osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=14784&comment_id=129950
…Not if you want to be taken seriously as an office suite.
Don’t get me wrong, I really like KOffice. It’s a hell of a lot cleaner and faster the OOo2; when I need to scratch some numbers in a spreadsheet, for instance, I can usually launch KSpread, bang in a few numbers and formulas, then shut it down… all in the time it takes OOo2 to load.
The integration with KDE is nice, kpart viewers and all that, the little things that gnomers hate and kde proponents expect.
As mentioned in a previous post, editing pdfs is also a killer feature.
I’ve started playing with Kexi, and it seems like a much better solution than Base, as well.
The only problem is I just can’t use it as much as I’d like to, because I’m stuck in an MS centric world, at least as far as my job goes. MS compatibility for opening docs is workable, but not being able to save to MS native formats is a deal-killer. I can’t even save to opendoc and expect them to render correctly in OOo2.
I’d also personally love to see some performance improvements in KSpread. Some of the spreadsheets I use at work are large with thousands of populated cells and hundreds of formulas, and even when successfully imported in they bring my system to a halt. In fairness, OOo2 suffers similarly although it seems to cope better. Excel, on the other hand, takes no more than a few seconds to handle re-calculations on those same spreadsheets. Naturally MS has had far more experience (and resources for) optimizing performance etc. for Excel, so it’s not necessarily fair to hold the open alternatives to a similar standard. But it would be nice…
I’m really looking forward to KOffice 2.0, from following some of the development blogs it’s looking like it will be pretty cool, and could gain some serious momentum once the native Windows port is done. Still, the lack of proper MS interoperability will unfortunately be an obstacle, no matter how much we wish it wasn’t so. Without it, the rest of the package has to really really shine.