The KOffice team has released KOffice 1.6.3. "This is the last maintenance release of the 1.6 series, containing mainly bug fixes. There are bug fixes for almost all of the components. See the complete changelog for the complete information."
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Member since:2006-05-09
I agree with you about all the needed features to having full compatibility with OpenOffice and Microsoft Office, but we must take into account that KOffice is a project developed by volunteers that work on its features in their spare time. I do not know if there is some corporate support from some middle/large size company but it is more probable than there is not, so, we cannot criticize this project because its slow development cycle.
Maybe we can cooperate it in several ways: Using it (with all its current restrictions), reporting bugs, writing documentation, maybe doing translations, fixing bugs, adding useful modules, etc. The larger community the better software.
Edited 2007-06-08 15:36
Member since:2005-07-22
Oh, no, I don't criticize it. I love KOffice with its problems. I really like it and use more KWord than Writer (in fact, I never really use Writer except when opening some doc KWord cannot read well). I find KWord a good word processor. Import/export filters suck a bit.
KSpread, in the other hand, even if it has its uses, has been bitten by some severe bugs that affected calculations. It's difficult to trust a calculator that has miscalculated before. So you have to be careful when sharing sheets with others, because the results could be terrible. It happened to me with OpenOffice and its LOOKUPV (I think) function which worked well with OpenOffice, but the implementation was different in MS Office, thus rendering the results incorrect when opened by a MS Office user. A total mess. I could not tell which implementation was wrong (probably Excel's one), but it doesn't matter after all.
It's not easy to share spreadsheets among different implementations and have the correct results, no matter what people think; you could have a mess in your hands, trust it and never find about it. I wonder how many people out there are haveing these problems without knowing.
To close, spreadsheets are a different animal than other office applications. The results may vary greatly depending on the functions used and how they are used/implemented. So, for me KSpread is not a choice. Probably Calc wouldn't if my life depended on it.
Member since:2005-07-07
Member since:2006-02-01
I wouldn't call implementing a 6000 pages (with a lot of reference to how other applications behaves) something easy to implement. I really doubt OOXML will be correctly supported in the near future, but it's possible that it will be better than the binary Office files. But what we advocates is to keep the pressure on MsOffice and government to really support ISO and open standard like ODF for interoperability. That's why even with the availability of the OOXML specification, not much effort will be put to support it.
Member since:
2005-07-22
It's a shame that all changes made are not so important. I mean, most office users (small office, home office, even not office at all, just want to open the damn .doc a friend sent me) need Word and Excel compatibility. KWord still needs better Word documents handling, and KSpread is almost useless for real world sheets. I like both and use them if I don't have to share documents. And I understand that supporting office formats is not so important for some developers, specially when Office 2007 came out recently with another format. But there isn't even true good compatibility with OpenDocument. If I load a sheet created with OpenOffice (a real sheet, not some stupid test) most styles are completely screwed. I wish I could dump that beast once and for all.