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KOffice Descendent Calligra Office and Creativity Suite Hits Release
jrepin writes "The Calligra team has announced the first release of the Calligra suite of office and creativity applications. This marks the end of a long development period lasting almost one and a half year. It is the first release in a long series which is planned to make improved applications every 4 months. Calligra is a continuation of the old KOffice project and it may be interesting for KOffice users to know what they will get. Some highlights are: a completely rewritten text layout engine that can handle most of the advanced layout features of OpenDocument Format (ODF), simplified user interface, support for larger parts of the ODF specification (for example line endings like arrows), and improved import filters for Microsoft document formats. There are also two new applications: Flow for diagrams and flowcharts, and Braindump for the note taking. Calligra Active is a new interface for touch based devices and especially for the KDE Plasma Active environment. Several companies have already used Calligra as a base for their own office solution. One of them is Nokia with their N9 high end smartphone where Calligra is embedded into the so called Harmattan Office."
If you are still using old fashioned .doc files or ODF, you can get away with using OpenOffice/LibreOffice. I've used OO.o with MSOffice 97-03 files for the past 6 years with minimal compatibility problems. However, all that goes out the window with OOXML files, since support for that is still abysmal in OO.o or LO. For instance, don't even think of editing a moderately complex (multi-level headings, lists, tables, etc.) docx in Writer. Writer makes a passable docx viewer but the file will be fucked up every single time if you modify it in Writer and then open it again in Word. I found that out the hard way.
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
Libre office simply has more features. There were a lot of features people wanted to add to open office but couldn't get past the Sun gatekeeper. That lead to the Go-oo fork with all of those added in. Now they've merged with libreoffice, so all of those features and developers have been added into libre. Basically the bigest features for me are improved MS format fiedelity in reading and writing.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Significantly decreased memory usage
Significantly improved compatibility/speed with OOXML and other formats.
Look & Feel better matches native applications
Improved Font Rendering on Linux
New import filters: Lotus Word Pro, MS Works
SVG import
Spreadsheets support RxCx cell references.
Can use online help for more up-to-date documentation.
then you've never looked at Dia have you? It's a reasonble competitor to Visio and it's opensourced.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
Visio import filter via libvisio is in the master already, so it will be available in 2.5 (it will be released in 4 months or something).