The KOffice team is proud to announce the release candidate of KOffice 1.5. Read the full announcement, the changelog, and download the release. In this release, the OASIS OpenDocument support is improved even more, especially in KChart. Krita has gotten faster and more stable and KFormula has a new maintainer who has really come up to speed quickly. Across the board all applications have been improved and polished. Or so they say, in any case.
I use Koffice all the time. It’s fast, it’s simple and it has exactly the toolsets that I use. Anything else is overkill and/or slow.
Oasis compatibility with OOo is not perfect yet (far from it). I wonder how long it will take.
On the other hand, KOffice is the first real life test for Oasis compatibility. It will show bugs in OOo, if they exist, and provide a showcase for other developers. I have to compliment KOffice developers for the courage to ditch their own implementations and switch to Opendocument. They are providing the first proof that the standard will hold, and seting our documents free.
It will show bugs in OOo, if they exist,
They do, and it already has. Bugs of that kind was among others located in the beta version of OOo Suse shipped.
although I’ve given up on linux in general now, I love Koffice, especially Kword. Small, fast, very useful – unlike many other word processors, lets me write a document in more than one language at the same time (something OOo or abiword can’t do yet)
Above all, the Koffice suit is actually just enjoyable to use, I can’t really explain how, or why it is, but it’s nice to use and unlike using OOo or MS word, I don’t find myself pulling my hair out wondering why it’s “decided” to be helpful and do something it thinks I wanted!
unlike many other word processors, lets me write a document in more than one language at the same time (something OOo or abiword can’t do yet)
Excuse me ? I have a hard time believing Abiword can’t write documents in more than one language, as every Gnome app can do that as long as they use GTK widget text entry or a derivative. You say you’ve given up on Linux, so perhaps you tried Abiword on Windows. In that case, you should say so instead of spreading unintentional FUD.
Above all, the Koffice suit is actually just enjoyable to use, I can’t really explain how, or why it is, but it’s nice to use
I agree, but some apps just lacks lots of functionality, so for example, my wife switched to gnumeric (on her own), even for managing things at home, instead of Kspread or OOcalc. I still did not finish installing this KOffice though. I was still installing Koffice 1.4.3, but with the latest KDE release, I switched to Koffice 1.5-rc1. Well, it’s become a monster tarball, at least 30 MB IIRC. It has already taken 4 hours to build on my PC, and it still is not finished.
I don’t use office suites at home, but my wife is a good quality tester for at least the spreadsheet : she’s using Excel intensively at work, both OOcalc and Kspread did not pass the test, and she uses a KDE desktop at home. But she found gnumeric herself, and it passed the test without problem.