KOffice 1.5 Released

[eddie]

The KOffice team is proud to announce KOffice version 1.5. With recent releases KOffice has established its status as the most comprehensive office suite in existence. No other office suite provides as many integrated and diverse components as KOffice. At the same time, KOffice requires only little memory and provides good performance, making it suitable even for old hardware and avoiding the need for expensive upgrades.

The list of stunning improvements for the 1.5 release is simply huge, and all of them were implemented just within a couple of months. KOffice is picking up momentum, quite a lot as well. With this release, KOffice starts its ascent into the office suite hall of fame. This version sports OpenDocument as the default file format, accessibility, a new project planning tool KPlato, professional color support and adjustment layers in Krita and the long awaited Kexi 1.0. You can read more about it in the press release and the full announcement. Packages are available for Kubuntu and SUSE.

KOffice was the first to support, and now with 1.5 the second office suite to announce full support for OpenDocument (ODF) as the default file format. With two independent implementations of ODF now available it is now a true industry standard. KOffice 1.5 is therefore the version that lets enterprises and organisations all over the world choose the office suite that fits their needs best.

Great care has been taken to ensure interoperability with other office software that supports OpenDocument, most notably OpenOffice.org. We acknowledge, however, that the ODF support and interoperability is not yet perfect. We hope to be able to quickly identify and fix the incompatibilities that do exist in the upcoming 1.5.1 and 1.5.2 bugfix releases.

KOffice is already the most comprehensive office suite in existence. In addition to the basic productivity applications mentioned above, it also includes a creativity application suite featuring Krita, a paint application with lots of image manipulation features, Karbon, a vector graphics application and Kivio, a flowcharting application. Other components are Kexi, an integrated environment for creating database applications and KPlato, a program for project management.

Home Page: *www.koffice.org
KOffice 1.5 Tour: *www.koffice.org/tours/1.5/

 

[mehulved]

That's an impressive list of improvements. I read somewhere that the list touched 1500 changes, if it wasn't a typo. But, my main question is, does it have anything above Oo.org for people who have enough RAM to run Oo.org? I am asking since I have only used Oo.org and never used Koffice.

 

[eddie]

Anything above OOo in what sense? The main question should be what are your requirements from an Office Suite? If you just want to type text documents, create a spreadsheet here and there...create a rare presentation then why use a heavy application like OOo when the same can be done by using a ligter option i.e. KOffice?

...but and that is a big BUT...if you want inter-operability between Open Document Format (ODF) of OOo and KOffice then I wouldn't hold my breath. If you plan to access your created documents which you saved in ODT format, from both Linux based OOo as well as Windows based one then I wouldn't create them using KOffice. KOffice still needs lot of work in saving the files in ODF (Teething problems in other words). It used to mess up things upto 1.4.2 but as advertised ODF support has been massively improved in 1.5 so you can still try it but don't rely on it for mission critical docs.

Just because KOffice has problems with ODF doesn't mean it is all down. It has its ups as well. For example: Unicode is much better supported in KOffice so if you want to create any regional language docs, then KOffice should be your preferred suite. Also, if you plan to create docs with embedded charts, spreadsheets, pictures etc. then also I would recommend KOffice mainly because all the parts of KOffice are highly integrated.

There are many differences between the two suites and you can't pin-point that one is better than other but I would personally recommend KOffice for the sheer speed and responsiveness it has.

 

[mehulved]

I mostly use OOo Writer mainly for my projects and have to save them as MS Word files. Also I use Impress to create presentations for slideshows for presenting the projects in college, so save them as ppt. So, would Koffice be suggested for the purpose?

 

[praka123]

OOo is the best.perhaps you can try abiword for a replacement.

 

[eddie]

I mostly use OOo Writer mainly for my projects and have to save them as MS Word files. Also I use Impress to create presentations for slideshows for presenting the projects in college, so save them as ppt. So, would Koffice be suggested for the purpose?

No it will not be. KOffice doesn't export to MSOffice formats and import filters are not very good too. It is primarily focussed towards the users of KDE.

 

[eddie]

OOo is the best.perhaps you can try abiword for a replacement.

How will using Abiword help him? Does it export to MS Word Document format? :roll:

 

[praka123]

How will using Abiword help him? Does it export to MS Word Document format? :roll:

Yes.It does.

 

[eddie]

No it does not! It just exports your document as RTF and then gives it an extension of DOC. RTF is extremely retarded when compared to DOC and has major formatting/embedding problems. You cannot create a fancy document for your project and expect it to have its formatting and embedded objects intact after saving it as RTF. It is good for just Bold, Italic, Underline stuff and nothing more. If that is all what is needed, even KOffice can do that.

 

[mehulved]

So, in terms of features OOo would be the best. Only its main -ve aspect will be resource consumption.

 

[Satissh S]

umm.. koffice has a very good uniform interface and is very light on resources.. me has been trying its devel version in gentoo.. krita has undergone some serious developments.

But avoid using gnome apps in kde or koffice in gnome. It can hamper performance considerably. Ideal situation for gnome users wud be to use abiword, gnumeric and for kde guys is to use koffice.

And for the bald folks at Sun is to use Oo.o in their high-power sparcs. simply speaking it does not find a place in my config

Does an office version get even more bloated..? i doubt

 

[eddie]

umm.. koffice has a very good uniform interface and is very light on resources.. me has been trying its devel version in gentoo..

Stable is already in portage. Time to sync?

Does an office version get even more bloated..? i doubt

You've clearly not used MS Office 2003 full installation