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ZDNet Reviews KOffice
Spotted over at dot.kde.org -- this review of KOffice. The review isn't overwhelmingly positive or negative -- seems like a rather balanced picture of both what's up to par, and what's still missing, for mainstream acceptance in the Normal Workplaces of the world.
I am glad we are finally getting good Office programs. If it is as good as KDE 2.2, I will begin using it.
The article mentions StarOffice and suggests that it is Java based. Is this true? It didn't used to be java afaik.
And this just in: ZDNet declared Master of Obvious for the third year running.
If you don't like reading a three page article by starting on page two, follow the link: *click*.
Unfortunately, I can't get the latest Koffice to run, cause libkprint or something isn't right. A botched kde2.2 upgrade has left my linux box moderately unusable. However, I've used previous Koffice in the past, as well as StarOffice.
StarOffice kinda sucked with the whole 'desktop' thing, and I was much more eager to use Koffice day to day when necessary. But I've noticed that StarOffice seems further along functionality-wise, and the latest OpenOffice downloads seem to be coming along nicely. They've lost that 'desktop' thing, and the components will all be 'single app' programs - definitely a good move, imo.
Given that the OpenOffice/StarOffice platform seem to be much more cross platform than the KOffice stuff, could we not see some merging of the projects, if only complementary filters to import/export each others' file formats? Maybe this is being planned, but it's not something I've seen touted. What I like about StarOffice the most is the promise of cross-platformness. I can work on my Windows OR Linux machines (maybe Mac too, haven't checked) without worrying about learning new interfaces or file format problems.
creation science book
Great solution as long as you don't go beyond KDE and KOffice. ... forget about pasting images, text copy/paste works in strange and unpredictable ways.
As soon as you do, things will look ugly
I mean come on. Kivio (=Visio)? Adabase (=Access) in StarOffice. And god awful slow?
Really, it's quite comforting to see the Linux community attempting the Office suite stuff. That's certainly the way that WordPerfect and Lotus really blew chunks!
An office suite that sigfault's is no use, even if you are willing it not to.
It's heartbreaking. Fingers crossed it's getting stabler by the checkin.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
M$ Office: $200-300
K Office: N/C (comes bundled with various distros)
That in itself is an important feature...
You're using her as bait, Master!
If you are looking at what the current API resources are for KOffice, click here.
"KOffice does offer some benefits over StarOffice. KOffice is natively compiled for the machine platform on which it is executing, whereas StarOffice is a Java-based application. This means KOffice responds much faster and is less memory-intensive than StarOffice."
Since when is StarOffice based in Java? Yes, it's really slow to load under Linux/FreeBSD, but I'd bet part of this is the same reason that koffice loads somewhat slow (though faster since it's less complex).. the whole GCC C++ runtime mess.
StarOffice seems to load much faster when it's run off Solaris, and I'd be willing to bet part of that is due to the Sun Forte compiler's used. Of course, I'm sure it has plenty of it's own tweaks. Anxiously awaiting StarOffice 6.0
...KOffice/Kword to make a big hit with users:
1) Allow reading/saving of documents as *.rtf
Rich text format seems to be the preferred document format among open-source word processors, yet KWord still lacks this feature. Heck, even MS-Word can read and save RTF! Supporting a common document format--instead of just *.kwd and *.txt--is going to be important for interoperability with other OSS office suites and the MS-Office world. Same goes for spreadsheet and presentation graphics file formats.
2) KOffice needs to have provisions for English measurement parameters in KWord and its other products. Yes, the geeks out there can convert to mm, but if you wanna get users off MS-Office, simple features like this will be important.
www.markvd.net rocks!
This is my sig, there are many like it but this one is mine...
Im still locked into m$ office for exchange server. Until someone comes out with an Exchange klone, m$ will dominate the market.
We had to install citrix clients so our NOC (running solaris on ultra 10's) could access the exchange servers. Even thou we don't use m$ products for our NOC, m$ infiltrated it via exchange.
E-Mail is at least 25% of my job, working on projects around the country, email is my ball and chain to the m$ platform. All documents open fine under StarOffice, but I still have to go back to exchange for my email. So I just run win2k on my laptop, use x-win32 for display, and samba to mount my solaris box and ssh to encrypt it. Basically Merge the two OS's into 1 via network tools.
I thought the article was very fair. It didn't seem to expect the world out of KOffice, and made the point that it was a volunteer effort.
Having recently fired up KOffice for the first time since the 1.1 release, I've got to say I'm really happy with where it's going. The team has done a great job on getting component embedding working (although it crashed on me when I started pushing it around a bit) and I really think this will shape up to be an incredibly powerful suite.
Of course, these things don't happen overnight. It took Linux about 8 or 9 years to start gaining more widespread acceptance in the server area. KOffice is a tremendous project, and it'll take a long time to get to the point where it can compete with MS Office. Remember, software like this doesn't just happen overnight, it has to evolve. MS Office has had over a decade to get to where it is. I have a feeling we'll start seeing KOffice as a real alternative to MS in a few years.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Many of the issues addressed should be easy to fix. The lack of an automatic spelling checker and a thesauris in KWord, for instance, should be easy fixes. Likewise the case sensitivity in the spreadsheet program, though most UNIX people won't tend to view that sort of issue as a bug. The customer is always right and all that.
On a quick side note, I still prefer TeX/LaTeX over any GUI word processor I've ever run across. I believe our documentation people 'round these parts still use SGML. Not something a normal user will ever look at due to the learning curve, but once you get a set of styles down, you can rattle off any old document you deal with on a regular basis with almost no effort devoted to the formatting of the document -- you just work on the content.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
KOffice does offer some benefits over StarOffice. KOffice is natively compiled for the machine platform on which it is executing, whereas StarOffice is a Java-based application. This means KOffice responds much faster and is less memory-intensive than StarOffice.
... since when?
Uh
Not even close, ZDNet, but thanks for coming out!
I've just started using kde again after not seeing it for almost two years. I'm quite impressed with the way it has developed, but have a few feature related questions.
I've never really been one to use a file manager, but after setting my desktop to be my home directory, i've started using the desktop, something i've never done with any wm. The problem is that in order to get into any of the directories, you have to start a file manager konqueror session. Is there a way that the desktop itself could be a simple file manager that would changer directories. An extention to this would be embeding a term in the desktop that would let the desktop be the current directory.
Now that we have gotten a very easy to use gui, i think we should try and move it towards the 'unix way' of doing things. This would appeal the the 'power users' as well as the beginners.
From the article:
Unfortunately, performance of this component proved troublesome. Trying to get the software to compute a basic SUM() function on a range of cells yielded an error. We later found out that, unlike in Excel, function names in KSpread are case-sensitive, so typing "=SUM(A1:A15)" in a cell yields an error while typing "=sum(a1:a15)" does not. This is a major shortcoming for anyone who has ever used another spreadsheet, including Lotus 1-2-3 and Quattro.
Wow, uhhh.. this sounds like a major problem to me. It's pretty easy to get use to (no rocket science behind holding down or not holding down the shift-key), and it would be trivial to fix. And it's open source, so they could just recompile KSpread with it not caring about case-sensitivity. Any novi programmer can do that.
F-bacher
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
is they complained about case sensitive table names
I'm a big retard who forgot to log out of Slashdot on Mike's computer! LOOK AT ME.
".... KOffice is natively compiled for the machine platform on which it is executing, whereas StarOffice is a Java-based application. This means KOffice responds much faster and is less memory-intensive than StarOffice... "
Do a little research. Just a little. From staroffice faq
Is StarOffice 5.2 software written in the Java language? Will Sun rewrite the StarOffice suite in Java technology?
"... the majority of the StarOffice 5.2 code is written in C++. Sun does not intend to rewrite StarOffice 5.2 in Java technology..."
Java is so slow that everything sun makes is crawls because of it. Mr Deignan believes everything his MS marketing rep. tells him.
#=-weo-=#
Yah KOFFICE as a program is not bad ..not bad at all ... but in order for it or any other gui program on linux to be more acceptable.....
.. we need improvements on the freakin GUI! yes on the GUI! yes .. Linux is beautiful underneath..but if we expect Linux to be used by more people ... we'll have to target the 99.9% of stupid computer users who dont know what a command line is.
X needs to stop crashing for no F*** reason, it needs to have a faster interface! . if we expect linux to become a desktop competitor
My Slashdot account is old enough to drink...
from the article:
/ fa q.html#12
"KOffice is natively compiled for the machine platform on which it is executing, whereas StarOffice is a Java-based application"
from the StarOffice FAQ:
However, the majority of the StarOffice 5.2 code is written in C++
http://www.sun.com/software/star/staroffice/5.2
Why do some many people think StarOffice is written in Java? Is it just because its from Sun?
--
I wish i knew how to get slashot in light mode without having to login
What metric do you want them to measure against? AbiWord? Gnumeric? Better to be compared to what has become the business world's standard and fall short than be compared to something virtually no one else uses and shine. If the standard is to have functions be case-insensitive and you don't follow it expect to be called on it. Expect the normal user to want it to be "fixed." They note that no other competing product uses case-insenitive funtion names so I would place the issue on KOffice. That's fair.
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
Lost productivity time due to malfunctioning import filters: Priceless.
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Thats about all there is in the article. If it took the author more than 4 hours to produce this I would be surprised. Fortunately, the geeks can now read this synopsis instead of reading the author's wordy version. This way we will save hundreds of geek hours.
how big is MS Office? more than 20 times that size. How much cheaper are embedded devices suitable for running KOffice than MSOffice? How much cheaper are 32 MB flash chips than 256 MB flash chips - a LOT. obviously the WinCE versions of MS Office are smaller than MSOffice pro... but they also lack a lot of the features. perhaps a better comparison is WinCE Office vs. KOffice...
-sam
The REAL sam_at_caveman_dot_org is user ID 13833.
mod this up, at Score:2 its underrated as is Cross Platform software
Is that anything like a K-Car? or K-Mart? If it is, I don't want it.
No...
They're reviewing it from the point of view of the typical user.
I'm as pro-unix and pro-case-sensitive a guy as they come, and even I wasn't expecting that to be case sensitive. It makes absolutely no sense, unless there are cell rows called 'a' and 'A' (hint: there aren't).
The fact that this is no longer true in current Kspread builds attests to it's pointlessness.
All that in 13 MB! I installed Office 2000 the other day. I need only basic Excel and Word, without almost all the extra's. It was still 66 MB (without PowerPoint, web editing stuff, Outlook Express...). Why does it need to be sooo big!
-- Cheers!
This review clearly illustrates what the DOJ should *at least* do with MS in the anti-trust case. ZDNET is not to blame for considering MS compatability of the documents produced by other vendors or by the OSS community. If 95% (maybe it is more like 99%) of the business community is used to exchanging documents in the format MS uses, you can hardly say ZDNET is biased by considering this. So how can anyone compete with MS in this arena? Split them up? How about just forcing them to release their "standards" as true standards. Make them publish fully their document formats across the board (not just with office). Then at least that can be stripped from future reviews and OSS projects and others will be free to compete on just the features they integrate into their offerings.
An error occurred on the Audiogalaxy website. Please try hitting REFRESH agan a minute
... they need to be ignored or better yet destroyed. Exchange is expensive and requires several people to baby it constantly and vast 100 gig RAID arrays to store data. I can't think of a single mail server application that is anything near as expensive to run and maintain.
..
It's time for natural selection to take its toll
A case in point is the Word/KWrite comparison. It talks about the frame-based nature of KWrite, but says nothing of the advantages of using this approach. The KDE developers simply chose a far superior tool to emulate- Adobe Framemaker- not Word. Because of their frame-based approach, I'd much rather use KWrite, DeScribe, or Framemaker than Word. BTW, Framemaker is a $900 program.
KWrite aside, what will realy make Linux a viable alternative is not another copy of Office, but extending the capabilities of existing, mature apps like Staroffice. More and better filters would do the trick, as well as a good collection of templates. For all of Office's advanced features, templates for simple things like letters are probably what sells it. Most people are horrified at having to lay out a page themselves, or make their own templates from scratch.
The review also talks as if KOffice is the only real Office alternative for Linux, besides the Staroffice they use for comparison. Though not the focus of the article, they really should have mentioned Gnumeric, the TeX/LaTeX/Lyx tools, and GIMP, to put things into perspective. There's more than one way to skin a cat, and the average ZDNet reader has no idea. Sloppy, sloppy journalism.
We have gnome office, kde office, *and* star office!
I think the reviewer meant to compare KSpread with Excel. Good old VisiCalc eh? Man I can remember Lotus 1-2-3 but VisiCalc? - before my time I'm afraid.
Now you and I both know that KOffice isn't nearly as polished and powerful as MS Office is (and Office XP is going to be).
But the thing is, when you look at how far KOffice has come in how little time, it becomes apparent that it's just a matter of time before it catches up and, provided its leadership isn't content to be "as good as" Office, surpasses Office in features and functionality.
It's the sheer rate of change and speed of development of KOffice that amazes me. In a couple of years, this free alternative to Office will most likely be at least as powerful as MSFT's product, except that it will cost nothing.
Office software is becoming like text editors and browser software: It's something you don't expect to pay for. And if MSFT continues to try to charge people for it, people will move over to the alternatives.
No, it ain't there yet, but look at where it was and where it is now. Look at how short the time was for it to get here.
And just think. Just a few months ago, people were saying that Linux would never be a viable desktop OS. A few who have their heads in the sand still say it. But it is viable now! Even my Dad, who usually lacks the time to learn anything more complicated than instructions written on a sheet of paper that he follows to the letter, could install and get running with KDE under RedHat.
All that's left is a Quicken alternative.
you know what I thought was kind of wierd? .DOC!!! that is fudged up....how can a WP read .DOC, but not export it, then export RTF but not import it!!
the fact that Koffice 1.1 can make and RTF but can not read RTF, s if you are writing an MS document you have 2 choices......Text(of cource) and
oh well, atleast it gives people a way of communicating to MS office people with incoming and outgoing formating.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
I actually need a stable solution for doing my studies at uni and some features (e.g. the grammar checker) are indispensible to me. I won't move to other suites till they integrate some of this into the system. But I don't think this will happen quickly in the free office distros.
...are there! Right click on the ruler and select your scale: mm, inches, or points.
-pea
Hello, I've been playing Unreal 2 beta. You linux faggots won't be able to play it for a long time... hahaha fags!!
It's nice that the KDE office suite exists at all, but if I need this stuff on my machine, it's to open/process the Word documents and Excel spreadsheets people keep sending me. And that means StarOffice, slow and clunky as it is.
...
Does anyone know how to persuade administration people not to write emails as Word documents and attach them? Apart from being awkward to open in Linux, they fill up mailboxes
It is unfortunately really. If you read the second page of the review, the first thing the authors test is functionality to communicate with M$ office file formats. If that is to be the first level by which KOffice is judged, it will never succeed (in their minds). Unfortunately, M$ has made a business of beating competition by (among other things) keeping file formats different. We need to judge the functionality of KOffice first, its compatibility with M$ second. While the latter goal is important, if we hold that highest M$ truely is the monopoly we accuse them of.
-Sean
I think it would be much better not to claim head-on competition with MS Office. Instead, produce nice, usable, stand-alone applications and think carefully about how to allow people to integrate them.
Allow me to borrow from your review format's style.
--KOffice does not have live spell checking. He seemed to think this was a limitation.:-)
(I disagree; the live spell check feature in MS Office irritates me almost as much as the stupid paperclip.) Both of which I leave turned off. All the more power to those who enjoy these features, I say.
If I ever see you in Metamod, I'll kick your ass.
Exchange does something other mail servers don't do. And it does it well.
I was going to say "groupware". But that's a bit of a misnomer. It does have various groupware functionality - but its specifically scheduling that it does well. Other groupware aspects are almost a brief afterthought.
Sure - there are other scheduling competitors out there. But I watched Cisco Systems gravitate towards Exchange despite their heavy investment in a Unix mail infrastructure and the problems a diverse desktop OS user base causes for functionality with Microsoft products (Cisco endorses Win2k, Solaris, and Linux as supported desktop options for their employees).
Its a shame that Exchange forces one to pick up all the usual MS bagage along with an otherwise top tier product.
"I'm gunna metamod you! better watch out! oo! oo! oo! I'm 1337!"
This is a WEB SITE for god sakes. Don't be such a fucking over-dramatic retard, no one fucking cares what their karma is. Go get some fresh air or something.
Personally, I thought the review was fair from a day-to-day non-computer-savvy-user's point of view. And since this type of user most probably is the intended end-user of a product such as KOffice, the developers should probably take ZDNet's little nitpicks to heart and make their program a better one.
A case in point:
Unfortunately, performance of this component proved troublesome. Trying to get the software to compute a basic SUM() function on a range of cells yielded an error. We later found out that, unlike in Excel, function names in KSpread are case-sensitive, so typing "=SUM(A1:A15)" in a cell yields an error while typing "=sum(a1:a15)" does not. This is a major shortcoming for anyone who has ever used another spreadsheet, including Lotus 1-2-3 and Quattro
Maybe this is one piece of criticism KOffice-programmers might want to take to heart. The difference between Excel being case-insensitive and KSpread being case-sensitive is one example of how people programming for a commercial entity take a slightly bigger interest in the needs of ordinary, non-savvy users than Open Source developers. It's a minor point, to be sure, but how often have you heard the myth flaunted that "the computer crashed because I got one comma misplaced"? KOffice, for now, exhibits some of this behavior, while MSOffice, for the most part (day to day tasks) does not. This is not surprising, as M$ probably spends a large amount of time and money on testing on "ordinary users", whereas the KOffice people don't (can't afford to), so I'm not blaming the latter, but rather, urging them to do something with fair bits of consumer feedback like this.
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As someone who manages Windoze systems in the real world, I can say that our acceptance threshold for Linux is not going to be an Office clone. 90% of our users never install Access or P-Point. Everyone uses Word, and almost everyone needs to be able to use Excel documents. In all cases, these users will be importing data from third party contact managers. Get the Win App support to the point where Windoze and Linux users can all use the same shared documents on the LAN, and more people like me will migrate more users to Linux.
Which program would win the "Most MS Office XP compatible" title?
That makes sense if you're doing a study of the feasibility of transitioning to a given office suite from MS Office.
That said, if you're going to do a comparison, it is unreasonable to pit MS Office against another suite based on support for MS Office files! Compare feature sets, stability, speed, size, usability, etc. The assumption that any office suite has to act as an MS Office clone in order to be as good as MS Office is a faulty one.
Consider this review, in particular... if I'm not currently locked into MS Office file formats, this review tells me almost nothing about the advantages and disadvantages of KOffice and MS Office.
Since a lot of software (such as KOffice) coming out recently seems to be attempting to replace previously existing popular Windows applications (therefore making Linux more appealing to average users), I think the following is appropriate:
The very idea of the lay person using Linux is ridiculous and anyone who doesn't see how palpably absurd this whole "Linux should replace Microsoft" jihad is delusional. The people the Linux community seems to be targeting are the ones who got C's in school, majored in Business or Economics in college, and then had 2.5 children. They are not interested in math or science... Do you see the point I'm making? They don't want to learn, they don't want to change, and therefore any effort expended towards converting those that don't wish to be converted is wasted energy.
These are people who will never get past the login screen without help. (Help as in, "someone does it for me", not "someone shows me and I learn" or "I bother to read the manual"). These are people who would find installing Windows 98 to be a daunting task.
It seems that at some point an implication that Linux should topple Microsoft, because EVERYONE loves reading man pages and setting up ipmasq. This is a war that Linux developers cannot win, and so it is a waste of time.
Linux developers should focus on improving the user experience of people who have already converted.
Microsoft will win because they know that in order to get mindshare you don't actually have to provide a good service, you have to provide the illusion of doing so.
I don't think the people this conversion effort is targeting are stupid, I think they just don't care. Johnny has to go to soccer practice and Jane has her piano recital; where does reading Learning Perl fit into this picture? IT DOESN'T!
I say this because so many people seem so passionate about this cause, this naive cause, but they should focus their energy and talents towards more realistic goals. Linux will always be a nerd's operating system. It is unfortunate but true. Writing a program which is similar in function and purpose to a popular Windows-based application is fine, just remember who your potential userbase is.
The author fails to state how well MSOffice imports/exports KOffice file format. I would think that bit of information would be of interest.
StarOffice 5.2 is so resource-hungry and slow that it might as well have been written in Java 1.1. Waiting a solid minute or so for it to fire up on a P2/300 with 192MB RAM, and running into its native widget set, it's easy to unserstand why someone might think it was written in Java. Less easy to understand is why ZDNet seems to have fired all of its fact-checkers.
The OpenOffice development snapshots are definitely peppier, so StarOffice 6.0 should be fine in this regard.. but 5.2.. eek.
Where Java does enter the StarOffice picture is that 5.2 has an open interface that lets you pick a JVM--or install one--to use as yet another macro language. This is a nice touch for all the Unix shops and others that have Java programmers on hand more readily than VBA people. You can use a nice, fast 1.3.x JVM with it, and develop with your existing tools and components. The other nice "Java" feature is SO 5.2's ability to use JDBC throughout for database access instead of native drivers or ODBC. Very useful and very elegantly cross-platform on Sun's part.
And incidentially, the "other" major SO5.2 scripting language is a VB clone, both in syntax and coding environment. SO has a different document object model, so MS Office macros won't run unmodified, but at least VBA skills can carry over. KOffice's use of DCOP for automation allows the use of any available language, potentially doing things one better--but without integration with a development tool as one gets with VBA and StarBasic, it remains at a disadvantage. Maybe bidirectional KOffice-to-KDevelop hooks (for C++) and KOffice-to-Netbeans/Forte (for Java) are a way to go.
Agreed: especially regarding the case-sensitive nature issue. The fact that the DOS world has done it wrong *doesn't* cost you points when you do it right! Also, I'd have felt better about their scripting issue if they'd compared VBA to Python. No doubt legacy VBA *is* an issue. Unfortunately VBA itself is an issue.
That's exactly the post I was going to make, but you've done it for me (and everyone else).
The bottom line for KOffice AFAIC is that if you have lots of complicated MS Word & Excel documents around, and/or you receive lots of them from others, KOffice probably isn't a good choice for you.
If, however, you'd like to use a Free, Open platform and don't need many of the `advanced' features of MS Office, KOffice is a very good choice.
I and my very non-computer savvy parents use it at our respective homes and are very happy with it.
Cheers..................
Opps! and a biggie: frames are a far better layout method! They might take a new user like 30 seconds to catch onto, but they they *rock*!
As long as there is an issue of compatibility with MS, all non-MS word-processing packages will be inferior (by definition, if you wish). We need to define some open word-processing and spreadsheet standards and start relying on them. I know it is a chicken and an egg situation, but you have to start somewhere, haven't you? Semething HTML-based probably. So format compatibility should never be an issue. Only GUI, how user friendly is this.
(personally I got tired of fighting with WYSIWYG type of software, so I'm learning LATEX which appears more to my liking)
The alternative -- an open office product -- will require training 99% of users at a cost of 1,000 to 2,000 per user for the class plus 2 to 5 working days (add another 1,000 for a low estimate. On this model -- the free product cost about 2,000 to 3,000. Sounds like $600 or so for full MS Office is cheap.
Take it out further -- if you are a 100 person company (user base for office product suite) this means MS Office costs 100 x 600 -- $60,000 plus 5 users out to training (those not already trained) $15,000 -- which means that MS Office cost you $75,000 -- not a small chunk of change. Of course the alternative will cost you $297,000 and the skills are not usefull for your workers in later life.
Of course this all assumes that you will be able to find the training -- not an easy task.
What about the savings in hardware? I'd argue their is little to none now-adays. A business would be foolish to buy less than 500mhz machines which are more than adequate for W2K/XP today. I'm writing this from a 350mhz box and it flies quite nicely with W2K. Kinda slow when running StarOffice under a default X install though (Redhat).
The OS install price and support price are arguably not an issue today either -- most 100 user offices will have at least one mission critical application requiring a windows system -- so your on the hook for licensing anyway (read it carefully...).
Choose an open office product? Risk your job for what appears to be a negative payback in the business world? Why are we advocating this again?
Exchange is NOT a pop server. It is not an IMAP server -- it is much , much more by design.
Good design or bad? I don't know. But it is different.
Can anyone give a GOOD reason why the heck you want a file system that is case sensitive ?
...and it can be turned on. It's simply a minor philosophical point. MS thinks spell-check should be on by default, KOffice folks think the opposite.
Any installations of MS Office or KOffice at a place of business would have standard installs, so if they wanted spell-check available to their employees, they'd make sure it was turned on before the started using it. Individuals have a choice either way.
Regarding MS's grammar checker, it's completely useless IMO. I have it turned off on my Win98SE partition at work, not only because I don't need it, but also because it just doesn't work, AFAIC.
A bias which exists because Microsoft owns 99% of the desktop market. That is a fact. You either deal with it, or you don't. And if you don't, your product sucks. An office suite that can't read MS Office documents is just about as useful as a server operating system that can use nothing but floppy disks.
Also consider that not everyone who needs or uses an office suite is a C-average business major with 2.5 kids.
Furthermore, if some people want to attempt to expand the Linux user base beyond the nerd niche, who the hell are you to have a problem with that?
Click this link to view it as a single page?
What in the hell is the postercomment compression filter, and why in the hell does it try to prevent the posting of a hyperlink to a single page version of a three page article? WHAT is Taco smoking?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
If MS had a problem with the "Office" name, they've got bigger competitors to attempt to crush in some silly legal suit before going after the KDE team, such as Corel's WordPerfect Office, or Sun StarOffice.
Just wondering if Crayon is a registered trademark of Crayola, or if it's just a general English word. If so, I have a feeling somebody's going to get a nastgram about changing the KOffice paint program (Krayon).
Well given that Word has 90% (or whatever..huge %!) market dominance, and that many of these people know VBA, I'd say it IS important. Most business don't exist in a vacuum where they don't deal with the outside world--in these cases it helps to be able to send and receive office docs that other people can read. So you bet compatibility is important.
Scott
I have often noticed ZDNET prefers "dumbed down" software features.
Their reviews for Microsoft Windows, especially the XP interface were glowing. They also tend to compare Microsoft products against older versions of the same product (especially OS'es).
So this means that for "innovated products" *snicker* like XP, comparisons with Win 2k or Millenium, make it sound totally awesome. Experience tells *us* a different story, namely XP is a *little* more stable but slower, but with closed and proprietary half completed garbage (XP firewalls and Media as an example).
My opinion is that they for the most part cow-tow to Microsoft for dollars and users.
A typical example, direct from ZDNets site:
XP has a radical new look, and Microsoft is likely to take a few hits from purists who think it looks either dumbed-down or too Mac-like. But after living with it for a while, we feel it is more pleasing aesthetically and more functional, once you get used to it. Still if you just can't stand it, you can always revert to the classic Windows interface.
Another example:
Setting up a network has never been easier, thanks to XP's Network Setup Wizard, which spells out, auto-configures and diagrams exactly how to create common network scenarios, such as a gateway machine for your in-house network. This feature alone may be worth the price of admission.
Jeepers!I cant wait to get XP!
I know it's not a full suite but I've found Abiword and Gnumeric much better at translations from Micros**t documents and spreadsheets. I'm trying to replace MacOS and MS Office on 300 iMacs with Yellow Dog Linux and some kind of Office-type products and I've tried everything that I could find, KOffice and StarOffice are not cutting it.
The Microsoft Office document importing is a standard thing, since I hear more people bitch about getting MS Word documents they can't open than I hear bitch about taxes, and in Canada, people love to bitch about taxes.
The function-name, case-sensitive issue is a major issue for me, having used Excel and ClarisWorks, and knowing that Lotus 1-2-3 and Quattro behave the same as Excel does (and I think StarOffice does too), it's annoying to find a case-sensitive spreadsheet. The standard, as far as I've ever seen, is =SUM(A1:D1), since all other spreadsheet programs do that. The fact that this is the exact wrong way to do it in KSpread means that KSpread is broken.
The VBA macros thing is an issue because StarOffice works, MS Office works, and if KOffice wants to be a contender, it will either have to interoperate (which is a good thing), or give people a -damned- good reason to switch over - which it does not have.
As far as I can tell, 'not up to par' in this case means that KOffice lacks features or has bugs that even -I- would run into, and I am hardly an office user. Any office suite that has limitations that I, of all people, would encounter is an office suite with serious limitations.
Ask me if I think those limitations are going to go away, however, and you'll get a much more positive comment. =:>
--Dan
keeping the RTF specification in RTF format... hmm...
Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org
KOffice 1.1 contains many of the major functional components contained in Microsoft Office, with a few "polished finish" exceptions. For example, within the newer releases of Office, Word documents are checked for spelling and grammar during composition, with colored underlining showing potential mistakes. KWord offers only a spell-check feature--and only as a user-invoked option. KWord does not check for grammar and does not have a built-in thesaurus.
Well many don't like the bossy word underlines whenever a typo or unrecognized word is input but I never cease to be amazed at the lack or evolution in WPs. I remember in the early 80s a product called mindreader that could predict the word you were writing within the first 3 or 4 characters. Could be annoying but if you are slow or pause typing it could also be handy and must be simple as it originated in the days of DOS and continues up to a point with the T9 technology found in some phones to create words from the keypad.
On the other hand, spell-checking in real-time is no big deal at all, and also a feature that many of us would just as soon do without.
AFAIK the KOffice, OpenOffice and Abiword developers are already working together on filters and such stuff.
My needs in an office suite, where I work anyway, I'm afraid requires MS Office. Specifically, to
- make nice pretty locked down spreadsheets for data from the production floor to be entered. Leave one cell that isn't for data entry unlocked and they'll hose the entire system.
- Automatically copy the spreadsheet data to an Access database for sorting and querying
- Exporting that data to managers for review/analysis/whatever it is they do with it.
Setting that up in KOffice seems an order of magnitude more difficult than doing it in MS with some scripting. I understand KOffice offers python for scripts, but it isn't documented. We need descritpions of functions, the arguements they take, and sample code. I have no idea how to even start to make such a script interact with KOffice. Don't see a way to make macros and command buttons either.
As far as workers switching, it won't be as bad as all that. We switched them from Lotus to Excel, IT hand converted all the spreadsheets. 90% of them didn't even notice, except the icon was different.
I do use it at home, and am impressed at how far it has come in so short a time. Can't wait until it'll knock the socks off of Windoze.
Linux in general has come a long way. My install of RH 7.1 was faster and no harder than installing windows.
-- When a fool hears of the Tao, he will laugh out loud.
Some posters here have mentioned that the fact that KOffice is free will be a significant factor in drawing people away from Microsoft Office. I'm not sure that's at all correct...A year or two ago, I remember seeing copies of Lotus SmartSuite 97/Milennium bundled with all sorts of PCs (not just IBM PCs), and OEM versions being advertised everywhere for AUD$30 (that's only about US $15).
SmartSuite 97 is probably still ahead of KOffice in terms of compatibility and features, plus it actually contained a famous component (Lotus 1-2-3), and it wasn't enough to stop it from sliding into complete obscurity.
KOffice (and StarOffice for that matter) have probably each got another 2 years or so of catching up before they even get close to where the now extict competitors of MS Office were a number of years ago...and being almost free didn't help them back then either.
is there anything wrong with case sensitivity?
... but it seems to me like the other ones are broken if they aren't case sensitive ... you might have different conventions of use for Sum vs. sum vs. SUM, for instance ... case sensitivity just seems to give more options.
Yes, if other spreadsheets are case insensitive and for learning purposes it would be easier for users used to Excel to not have case sensitivity, perhaps it should be turned off by default
I think a harder transition would be the opposite situation (case-sensitive to case insensitive).
I think part of the review is unfair. All word processors a expected to open M$ Word documents, but never the other way around. They try opening M$ Word documents in KOffice, but they don't test if M$ Word can open KWord documents. If not being able to export a KOffice document to an Word doc. is a limitation then not being able to export to KWord must be a M$ Word limitation.
They don't look to much at the good thing, like limited use of disc space, or the fact that KOffice is open source an M$ Office isn't.
I didn't say it was your fault. I said I was going to blame it on you.
for my essays
I tried StarOffice 5.2 recently. It mildly surprised me.
I was even able to open up a PowerPoint presentation, and it did it perfectly!
I'll admit, the darn thing is slow...especially to load. But I see a lot of potential in this piece of software. Too bad they implement their own widgets...
Get ready for Ximian Evolution! A very nice outlook clone. It should work with standard pop/imap servers and does full groupware type stuff.
What in the hell is the postercomment compression filter
When you post a comment, Slashcode compresses your comment to see if you just typed the same thing over and over to crapflood the database. Because of the way the developers implemented postercomment compression (the fraction remaining after compression must be greater than r, and r is a piecewise constant function of the comment length), the filter rejects all comments under about 100 bytes.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Lost productivity time due to malfunctioning import filters
You shouldn't be trying to import a COM serialization (Word's native document format since office97); it'd be almost like trying to import a core snapshot from a program running under debugger control.
How hard is it for Word users to save as text, RTF, or HTML? Most of these free software office suites import HTML and other standardized formats just fine.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Does CSS-2 have headers
You mean the logo and ad banner at the top of every web page, or do you mean "headers per page with page numbering"?
footers
Again, the copyright notice at the bottom, or page numbering?
footnotes
HTML can easily do endnotes, and it can also do parenthetical citations, as you see Slashdot already starting to do with the bracketed hostname at the end of a link.
page-breaks
Manual page breaks cause trouble with the different font metrics of e.g. Times/TNR and Helvetica/Arial fonts from different vendors. The problem of pagination would be better handled by a layout engine that can say "This table must fit on one page" or "Do not break <p> elements such that only one line remains on a page."
As an AC pointed out, CSS2 Paged Media supports many of the features you mentioned; all you need to do is fund a project to implement it.
line-breaks?
I've always used <br /> to create line breaks in XHTML.
Will I retire or break 10K?
"Last Tuesday's Financial Report" is much more readable than ... "fr0123.dat"
So call the file fr0123.dat, but design your filesystem to store a piece of metadata "icon_name" that can hold a longer filename. Use the filename for locating directories and files, but also show the icon name in file pickers. fr0123.dat (last Tuesday's financial report) is quick to type-select and easy to read. Several DOS TUI shells did this. Windows almost does this, except it always computes the filename from the icon name.
Will I retire or break 10K?
frames are a far better layout method!
If HTML frames are so good, why don't popular web sites such as Yahoo!, MSN, AOL.com, ebaY, and Slashdot use them? Those sites mostly use tables or CSS2 instead.
(On the other hand, you might be talking about a different kind of frame. If so, please fill me in instead of calling this comment flaimbait.)
Will I retire or break 10K?
An office suite that can't read MS Office documents is just about as useful as a server operating system that can use nothing but floppy disks.
Most office suites can read MS Office documents, but not MS Office documents saved in the proprietary "serialized COM stream" format, which is almost like trying to open another app's files by reading core snapshots. If you save an MS Office document in a standard format such as text, basic RTF, or MHTML (HTML, CSS, and graphics in a single MIME file), free software will import it just fine.
"A server that can read only floppy disks"? Try "a server that can't read Apple II or C=64 floppy disks because they use a different type of modulation." Trying to read Word documents (which are intimately tied to MS COM) is almost like trying to read a hard drive by removing the platters and placing them in another housing (assuming cleanliness).
Will I retire or break 10K?
given that Word has 90% (or whatever..huge %!) market dominance
On the Web, HTML has 99% market dominance. Plain ASCII .txt has five-nines market dominance; the 1e-3% is largely old mainframes still running EBCDIC.
many of these people know VBA
IOW, you're saying "You can take the VBAer out of VBA, but you can't take the VBA out of the VBAer." To show a VBA programmer that VBA/VBS is considered harmful, put her on Windows 9x (95, 98, ME), send her a memo infected with a macro virus, and then send her a VBS that claims to be another memo.
It's really not VBA so much as the lack of good file and memory protection in the host operating system. VB* just makes it too easy to write viruses and trojans, which has earned it the nickname "Virus Builder."
it helps to be able to send and receive office docs that other people can read.
And HTML+CSS2 doesn't meet your requirements why? Is it too hard to ask your clients to save their documents as HTML?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Basically, he said that Kwrite could often export DOC files OK in their experimental builds, but any kind of fancy embedding or something being wrong by literally one byte... would CRASH WORD!!
So when your user asks to export a .doc file, export a .rtf file named something.doc. Word knows what to do when it sees the RTF header instead of its own COM stream header.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Maybe Not.
Some things just become too cheap to meter, and hard drive space is one of them.
If this statement were true, nobody would need gzip. However, last-mile bandwidth has not yet become too cheap to meter. It costs some people $200,000 to get high-speed access because they don't live in an area where the local telecommunication monopolies offer DSL or cable modem service. Ever try downloading the whole set of Windows service packs or a Debian apt-get upgrade over a telephone modem connection billed by the minute (as is the case in e.g. Europe)?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Useful tip for Excel: Type all your formulas in lowercase. If Excel finds no syntax problem in your formula, Excel will uppercase it in the formula bar. This has been true since at least Excel 3. This is the kind of useful feature the lack of which leaves a bad taste in reviewers' proverbial mouths.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I finally got Koffice1.1 installed after a MAJOR effort dorking around with RPM dependencies, etc. But I have to say, kOffice looks very professional and very polished. My compliements to the developers. I'm sure there's functionality missing compared to both MS OFfice and StarOffice, but we have to remember - some of this functionality is so ethereal that it's used by only a small group of people anyway.
I think the KOffice team should concentrate on document interchange issues (RTF support, for example), and fleshing out the functionality in certain areas. The KOrganizer, for example, is off to a very good start, but it really needs an integrated contact manager with the ability to create printing templates for envelopes and the like. If it had this now, I'd be very tempted to drop my use of Palm Desktop entirely.
Now, can you read the bold-faced words for me? Can you tell me if they're the same words?
I know "bandwidth" and "hard drive space" are not the same. Please replace the part of my comment with "However, this is not true of all resources on which the size of an application depends. For example, last-mile bandwidth has not yet become too cheap to meter."
Will I retire or break 10K?
You are talking about two different things - hard drive space and internet bandwidth.
Yes, I am talking about two different things, and I want to emphasize that they are different. Hard drive space is nearly free; however, moving files from one hard drive to another hard drive isn't.
And besides, you can get most software on CD.
But what if the specific program I want isn't on a CD? Is there a service where I can enter my CC#, address, and the URLs of files accessible by Freenet, HTTP, or FTP, and have the files burnt onto a CD and sent to me?
Will I retire or break 10K?
I use VB in Excel regularly. Think developing a Monte-Carlo simulation module for a forecasting model.
Which can easily be rewritten in ECMAScript, which is thought to be easier to sandbox.
but what other choices do I have given that all my clients run Office?
All your clients also run IE. You can script IE's DOM with ECMAScript.
I probably missed something really stupid.Will I retire or break 10K?
There are so many ways this is just wrong. Word processor should require NO training, and other productivity apps should require very little. MS "training" never ends, but right now KDE's applications follow most of the MS input conventions. Anyone familiar with MS junk will pick up KDE in no time, but will be much happier with the better organization. Those that stick with MS are losing time and money everyday fighting an evershifting and ineficient interface.
If you need "training" to work a word processor, the word processor is cumbersome and poorly designed. I taught myself how to use Word Perfect and Word. Word remains an illogical mess with too little user control and too many second rate tools cluttering up disorganized menues. Word Perfect was easier to learn and did most things better. I have not used KWord enough to really comment on all that it can do, but it was not difficult to learn.
The "features" that most MS Word lovers praise as being the most powerful, and certianly require the most training, is second rate and inconstant. Word 2000 breaks previous macros! Word XP will certianly do the same. So there you are, constantly chasing broken junk that never looked quite right. It's worse than VB. Where is the economy?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Can ECMAScript give me an Excel spreadsheet within IE?
No, because IE doesn't have an ECMAScript DOM. However, ECMAScript can give you a spreadsheet from a plugin that has a DOM.
The simulation stuff would be easy to port
Correct. An Excel spreadsheet has the characteristics of any declarative program, and given that you can parse the file format, automatically translating such a spreadsheet into Haskell or another declarative language (or even C) would probably be straightforward. From there, use ODBC to talk to the database and pull all your data.
I've never really liked spreadsheets for implementing heavy apps because they blur the line between a declarative program and a flat database.
it's the links to the spreadsheet that would be difficult (this example is spread out over 30 sheets with somewhere around 2mil calculations).
What kind of "links" are you talking about? SQL can easily link several tables together with a relational "join" operator.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Basically, there's a dependence flow, where each cell on a spreadsheet is referenced to cells on previous sheets.
The Free Software Foundation has a dependence flow manager that can track dependencies between objects in a filesystem and can call programs to re-create files when the files they depend on have changed. This tool is called GNU Make and comes with most distributions of a GNU system or a GCC development environment.
I'd actually love to move to a browser interface
And you can with server-side Ruby, Python, Java, or Perl. Simply port your simulation to a compiled or interpreted language, create a makefile to re-run the simulation whenever the input changes, and write CGI programs to coordinate the whole mess into a Web application. If the whole thing runs on one box (as is most often the case for a flat-file app), and that box must run Windows, use the Win32 version of Apache HTTP Server, the MinGW GCC distribution (or Cygwin if your app is GPL compatible), and ActivePerl or ActivePython.
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