Linux Office Suites

Cowculator writes: "Sun Microsystems will release the beta version of StarOffice 6.0 in October, with the development version already available. This ZDNet article has some more details, including a link to the development version..." Other submitters sent in notes about Gobe Productive and Hancom Office 2.0, not to mention KOffice and the Gnome office applications. As far as I know all of these are lacking the single most important thing, a robust and complete set of import filters for Word, Wordperfect, Excel, Powerpoint, etc.

Comments

Re:How about intermediate formats?

[Pfhreakaz0id]

>>Further, the only really important Microsoft Office applications are Word, Excel and Access.

Actually I'd say, for most businesses this is the order: Outlook, Word, Excel, Powerpoint. For more some, (without a decent IT staff) Acess would be after word. Do you wonder why people don't leave outlook after numerous virus attacks? It's that useful, that's why.

will these other "word" programs join OpenOffice?

[Sleepy]

I for one would like to put aside the KDE & GNOME bias that pushes many to adopt this word processor or that.

Our fundamental problem to be solved is a lack of UNIVERSAL and fully functional MS-Office import *and* export filters. At this point, I would say it's the biggest problem Linux users must struggle with (emphasis on "users" here... the administrators must still struggle with Linux's crappy font management, etc).

RTF, HTML, and the "other" semi-formatted languages don't support popular features very well, such as tables and frames. Would YOU export your resume from a Linux app as HTML or RTF, and leave it to Office to render correctly? HR people are the most "clingy to Office types", and if your resume looks shitty - it's YOUR fault not theirs (world is not fair).

If your RTF resume looks bad in Office, *obviously* you are not a good candidate. You show little attention to detail to allow your resume to overlap characters and corrupt text. I've seen Office mangle some RTF docs that look PERFECT elsewhere -- it's an anti-competitive feature of MS Office. RTF documents from Office, re-import perfectly.

SO... to get to my point, we need good filters. The KDE Office and AbiWord folks should get together on the OpenOffice mailing list, and work to make sure the OpenOffice filters are exactly what they need. There's NO EXCUSE for not standardizing our I/O filters now.

As a great example of co-operation between KDE and GNOME applications, look at gPhoto. This started as a Gnome digital camera app, but the code became something better... a standard Linux API for cameras. Now there's a ton of KDE and Gnome apps, all of which run on top of gPhoto.

Just because KDE and GNOME use fundamentally incompatible desktop libraries, does not forgive these folks for not working together on EXTENSIONS to the desktop. We need more success stories like gPhoto, in areas like Printing, Font Management, pretty Wizards for Samba, etc.

I think about the lack of such examples in Linux, and the thought depresses me...

_Scott

When is Slashdot moderation going to favor less frequent "signal" posts, over "dozen posts a day" noise accounts?