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KOffice 2.0.0 Now Open For Firefox-Like Extensions
jakeb writes "After a massive three-year development effort KOffice 2.0.0 has been released (packages for Kubuntu are available) aiming to be a lightweight, cross-platform office suite that supports third-party apps and extensions. With its new design (everything, including the core components, is a module) and bindings, you don't need to know C++ to hack on KOffice, as extensions can be written in Python or Java, among others. TechWorld has an interview with KOffice marketing coordinator Inge Wallin about the vision for an easy-to-use office suite that supports click-to-install extensions like Firefox. Will this be the key to KOffice rising above all other free office suites? The KOffice devs think so. An online repository of extensions, templates, and content for KOffice? I like the sound of that."
An online repository of extensions, templates, and content for KOffice? I like the sound of that."
OMG!!! An online repository of extensions?!?!?! It's not like OpenOffice.org hasn't had that for ages. Oh wait...
OpenOffice.org also have point and (couple of) clicks extensions. Extensions can also be written in Java and Python. So where are the news here?
What, no windows packages??
Or is this available via the KDE for Windows installer?
Congrats to the KOffice team! I refuse t use OO (too much Java) so I'll finally have a decent free office suite!
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Don't bother saying anything about KOffice or any other Office product becoming popular until it can be installed on Windows with a setup.exe or an MSI.
Most of us here love Linux and/or BSD, but no office suite is going anywhere without a fully functional, easy to use Windows version.
From TFA:
Our goal for now is to release a first preview of what we have accomplished. This release is mainly aimed at developers, testers and early adopters. It is not aimed at end users, and we do not recommend Linux distributions to package it as the default office suite yet.
Why don't they release this version as KOffice 2.0 BETA? Funny that they put the 0.0 number to kind of "inform" that it is the very very first version...
It seems to me that it is official, Open Source .0 versions = beta
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Sweet! Now I can block ads in documents!
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
KOffice 2.0 is just great, brilliant software. The same done right. But I wonder how KOffice can be moved towards the cloud?
What happens when Microsoft plays foul with ODF?
etc.
I'd love to try it out.
I went ahead and installed it (160 mb for the entire kde runtime... lightweight, right) and it wouldn't run.
kword(4657) KServiceFactory::findServiceByDesktopPath: "findServiceByDesktopPath: Office/kword.desktop not found"
That's enough screwing around with KDE, at least until I get a new computer. I swear the devs are all running 4+ gb of Ram on multicore machines. Granted, this old thing is a 4-year-old celeron 2.8ghz, but still. Abiword runs fine. Granted, Abiword doesn't faithfully reproduce the full bloated complexity of the modern .doc, but I really don't want to.
What's with this obsession people seem to have with extensions all of a suddenly. I don't want to manage a pile of extensions all the time I want all the core functionality built in. I don't care too much about bloat, memory is dirt cheap and even the lowest spec (desktop) machine I would ever use now is more than a match for a full on office suite. I can't help feeling this is yet another situation where choice and configurability is being touted as a good thing when actually it's a problem because there is simply too much of it.
IMHO the worst feature of Firefox is extensions. It's great that you can tailor it to your own needs but the constant updates (colourful tabs I'm looking at you) drive me round the bend and a fresh install on a machine means half an hour finding and downloading all those extensions again. Perhaps it would be more acceptable if there was a way of just indicating that updates should be automatically installed and providing a simple list of extensions to install on first execution.
The other problem I find with extensions is the way they break package managers. Hopefully as KOffice is a core package there will be some common sense applied. If you look at the Eclipse packages some extensions are packaged but most aren't pretty much defeating the whole point of using the distro package repository (and they are horribly out of date).
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
finally, a method of censorship that we can all live comfortably with? robbIE? remember, your patentdead PostBlock devise is STILL not wwworking.
I'm glad to see that we have so many software options for even the most basic computer functions that Average Joe User needs to hire a personal assistant to make intelligent decisions about what software packages to install. Oh, but Average Joe User doesn't use Linux so we don't need to worry about that. Correct, and this is one big reason why.
mmmm...forbidden donut
A I see (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_Office) a couple of independent program jumbled together. Typical GNOME...
That's weird, man.
I can see a problem.
The website says It is not aimed at end users, and we do not recommend Linux distributions to package it as the default office suite yet.
Clearly learning from the KDE4 debacle, they've named this release "KOffice 2.0".
More comes ... It is noteworthy that KOffice 2.0 does not have all the features that KOffice 1.6 had. These features will return in the upcoming versions 2.1 and 2.2
I.e., like KDE4, don't use the first two releases, wait for the .2 release.
that there's only one pattern of trouser: business suit. It would be terrible to have different cuts, materials and even colours, since you'd need a team of fashion designers to work out what clothes to buy...
This whole "K" thing has gone on too far. Sounds like a "K" iddie Mar"K"eting effort, and undermines everything they do.
I wish they would do something with KDevelop.
This is my sig.
Having MS Office and IE objects be scriptable via COM is one of the great success stories in Windows. It's funny though, now that everyone in the Windows world has moved on from Office scripting, everyone in the Linux world, who used to mock interpreted language bindings, suddenly now has to have it.
This is my sig.
I think the main point they've got going for them isn't the featureset, but the fact that the developers don't appear to hate their users with a passion, as opposed to two other major office suites that I won't mention here. Maybe they can use that to listen to their users better and swim faster to perfection, or maybe they're too far behind already. I don't know. But I still like their devs better.
I've been waiting for the Firefox extensions idea to spread to other software since it came out!
Sadly I have no time, to realize my dream, of re-implementing the coolest UI features of Lotus WordPro in KOffice. (Eg. InfoBox, but with keyboard-only control. [To minimize the keyboard-mouse switches, but maximize the usability trough showing what's available.])
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
You mean it wasn't available in 2.0.0.0.0.0.0?
Hope, the Kross Plugin architecture get's implemented in all KDE in a way plug in are developed? Konqueror has implemented Kross extension architecture but has any user ever downloaded and install a plug in other than that come in by default ????
Huh. Sorry, that's complete bullshit. While everyone knows that a .0 version may have bugs, it's also expected that a .0 version *will* be ready for prime time. If it's not, it should have an alpha or beta moniker.
I appreciate your opinion, and I even understand your point of view. Do you understand that releasing software may be something that is not just for your benefit? There are integrators, developers and others that need this release. And you should try it, you might even like it. Depending on how many features you actually use from an office suite.
What? No one is saying that it shouldn't be released... Why are you warping things to make it seem like that? What they are trying to pound into your tiny head is that the version should be properly labeled as what it is, and you are in such denial that you will never admit that they are right...
You can put google ads in RSS feeds, too. So if you can distribute something in that format...
K Office 2.0 released; more SVG
When will we see Konqueror have the ability to run Firefox-like extensions and javascript? The ability to execute shell commands is powerful, but why needlesslyreplicate the thousands of Firtefox extensions? Or maybe what is needed is KDE4 integration for Firefox. i.e. KDE-specific Firefox extensions to access the KDE environment.
I don't expect all office suites to be like M$. But I do have expectations when the word "suite" is used. In fact I found M$ office suite a disappointment here. For example Visio looks different then the other applications - no Ribbon, no way to get rid of that ugly baby blue.
I expect something like OpenOffice - each and every part has the same look and feel and of course OLE (or equivalent) works absolutely flawless.
Everything else is a misuse of the term suite.
...I personally use Open Office in GNOME, and KOffice on KDE, occasionally using Gnumeric on either because I like it.
And if all these things fully supported ODF, you could actually use all these apps 'when you feel like it', keeping your data in ODF documents. I'm not sure you manage to mix apps this way today? Or do you use one app consistently for a given set of data? Doesn't sound like a great solution to me.
I sure hope somebody writes a nice plugin for MSOffice pre-OOXML files (since they support Java plugins, maybe this could actually be done using the Apache POI Java library). As it stands, .doc, etc probably provide the best interoperability available today. Not a happy situation, but thanks to OOo, not an unlivable one either. KOffice really needs to join the club with .doc and .xls, or it'll never be anywhere near as useful as it could be.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
As long as Aaron "New Paradigm" Seigo isn't involved in the KOffice suite, it might turn out ok. Seigo would try and turn the word processor into some sort of social networking web 2.0 widget fest. "Each letter in the document is a widget, and can be rotated and transformed into a moon phase clock. Of course, none of this actually works yet, but I blame that on nvidia drivers."
In some programs extensions can modify the behavior of other extensions; programs often don't provide impenetrable barriers between extensions. In my experience writing and using extensions for various programs, it's best never to develop strong dependencies on extensions because they often aren't upgraded to work with the latest version of the base application (when the extensions no longer work with the latest base software, the features those extensions provided will vanish. This is particularly true if you're not a programmer who is willing to hack source code to keep your favorite extensions up to date.
As a user who is less interested in hacking code then I used to be, I still appreciate the freedoms of free software (and strongly encourage those freedoms for their own sake). But I find it more productive to scale back my needs to meet with whatever the base program can do for me and learn variations on a theme as I go from program to program. For example, most word processors do mail merge but no two word processors do mail merge in exactly the same way. So I learn the concept, a few variations in mail merge interfaces, and I'm prepared to implement mail merge functionality with various programming languages by writing my own program if necessary. Some preparation by learning multiple approaches gives me a backup means of doing this tedious task if the one mail merge interface I prefer most doesn't work out.
Digital Citizen
Allow plugins, and somebody is bound to do it, plunging the FOSS world into a deep and evil darkness.
Don't bother saying anything about KOffice or any other Office product becoming popular until it can be installed on Windows with a setup.exe or an MSI.
- First as you said yourself in your follow-up : KOffice is part of the KDE software that can be installed on Windows with their package manager.
- OpenOffice.org
Installs on Windows with a very standard installer.
The only minor problem in my opinion is getting the plugins. It uses the kind of plugin manager as the older versions of FireFox (you can't directly search and browse the installable plugins from there, you have to go to a website first). Also the plugin manager doesn't help you to restart the "quicklaunch" if a restart is needed.
It cool be great if I could install LanguageTool with a simple click from within the manager, the same way as AdBlock+ in recent versions of Firefox. But I'm nit-picking. Back to the subject.
- Gnome Office :
It's not an actual suite, its a lose collection of separate software that cover the needs of an Office suit. All use the same library underneath (GTK+) which has been ported to windows since ages (back at the begining of the GIMP on Windows port). As such you can find installers for :
- AbiWord (word processing)
- Gnumeric (spreadsheet whose accurate statistic formula are done in collaboration with R projet)
(and probably other GTK stuff if you need them).
In fact, as they are small separate software with a very small footprint (compared to behemoths like OO.o), they are quite popular and often recommended for people wanting to build for free small lightweight Windows installation on underpowered hardware.
- For the VI vs. Emacs flamewar combatant out there (the kind who'll immediately scream that they don't need an actual office suite as every needed function and even more is available in some Emacs mode/Vim plugin), both softwares are also available for Windows, if that's your kick. (And yes, I'm not sarcastic. I'm definitely sure that here on /. you'll find at least a dozen of people who can be more productive with a complex emacs-based stack).
So as we can see, the three major players of Linux/BSD's office suites (and the two editors behind most holy wars) are installable on Windows (and on Mac OS X for that matters too).
Yes they are indeed cross-platform.
KOffice was more of a problem until recently the whole KDE switched to Qt4 during is 4.x branch and took opportunity of the major overhaul to be rebuilt with cross-platfrom portability in mind.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Unfortunately that is the first criterion by which I must judge an office suite. I see the occasional customer accidentally saving files as DOCX, but nobody has ever asked me whether I do OASIS documents, as well. So any word processor I use must first scale that mountainous mess of MS file formats to be at all useful to me.
The Windows stuff can't be 100% because of things like DBUS are lacking.
No. KDE4 comes with dbus-daemon.exe (plus dbus-launch/monitor/send utilities). It starts when you run the first KDE app, along with kded4 and klauncher, and the first time you save, kioslave. It's quite impressive to see all the UNIX-like trappings of KDE show up. The missing elements are Linux desktop goodness like Plasma and KWin and KRunner.
I use Okular from KDE on Windows as my PDF viewer, I've triied using KPresenter for .odp with some success (it disagrees with OpenOffice about slide masters). I haven't explored the rest as much.
=S
Can anyone with experience with both OpenOffice and KOffice comment on MS-Word compatibility? I've been having headaches with this lately - I have a large document starting from a large MS-Word template, where I've been working on "my parts" in OpenOffice (under Linux) with the thought of doing a cut-and-paste back into the master document. I need to do the cut-and-paste using Word in Windows to make sure there aren't any problems, so saved my work in .DOC format in OpenOffice and went to find a Windows machine (actually, it wasn't that simple - normally I'd do this with my VMWare Windows install, but the master document is apparently so complex that it wouldn't actually open under VMWare - maybe a memory issue?). On the windows machine, my oo-saved .doc file wouldn't open - apparently oo saved a bad .doc file... So now I run back to my office, save in .odt format, run back to the windows machine and install openoffice (browse the web for a while waiting .... la, la, la....), transfer the file. Now I can have my part open in open office, the master document open in word, and can cut and paste between the two.
Did it work? Yes. Was it a pain? Definitely yes. So my question is: would this have been any easier using KOffice?