What can KOffice 2 Beta 2 offer us?
[ Sunday, 2 November 2008, riklaunim ]
KDE4 isn’t the only application under development rush in the KDE world. KDevelop 4 and KOffice 2 are also being migrated to Qt4 and enriched with new features. This time I’m going to check what KOffice 2 Beta 2 can offer. I’m using KOffice 2 SVN build (frome day before beta 2 was announced).
Kword
Like other KOffice apps, Kword has a new interface. By default elements responsible for text formatting can be found at the bottom right corner of the Kword window. In the first tab we have the basic formating rules such as bold, italic, underline and lists. In the second, a list of predefined styles for text elements like headers. This interface emphasis the KDE4 paradigm to allow users to use the software in the “right way”. For Kword it means that you can write a document, but you have to style it using standard formatting for plain text, sections, lists etc. It is probably a good way to do this, but people who want some freedom in the way they make documents may be a bit unpleased.
Rys 1. KWord with an open document
KOffice uses ODF formats, but compared to OpenOffice, the support of ODF isn’t good, or even acceptable at the moment. Kword crashed while attempting to open some of my bigger ODT files. With smaller and simpler files there was no problem, and the formatting look similar to that from OpenOffice.
Kspread
Rys 2a. Kspread
Rys 2b. The same file in OpenOffice
Kspread has also the same interface as Kword for formating text, inserting charts and images. The biggest problem is probably with Kchart charts, which are totally incompatible with charts made and displayed in OpenOffice. Cell formating is handled quite good. As for stability, Kspread can crash from time to time.
Some users use spreadsheets to make some sort of documents (reports etc.) which has a lot of custom formating, which can be done in Excel and OpenOffice Spreadsheet. In Kspread currently such documents may look different than in those applications.
Kpresenter
Rys 3a. Kpresenter with a ODP presentation
Rys 3b. The same slide in Impress
Presentations often contain images, charts, text blocks and animations. It looks like KOffice often has problems with those non-text elements. The largest differences between OpenOffice and Kword is visible in Kpresenter. Kpresenter also crashes while attempting to open PPT files now. It can handle ODP files, but most of them will be displayed quite badly.
Rys 4a. Impress
Rys 4b. And Kspread
Conclusions
KOffice is going forward. It has new and improved user interface, more integration between it’s apps, and it’s very lightweight in terms of resource usage compared to other full office suits. Key element for the stable release now is better ODF support (compatible with OpenOffice). As usual stability is a major concern as well.
Rys 5. Will Karbon win with Inkscape as a SVG editor?
Translated by el_es. Proofread by Phillip Smith.
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6 Comments
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What I also like besides KOffice being very lightweight is that the new version has an UI that is better designed for widescreen LCDs which is what people buy today. Absolutely looking forward to KOffice 2.
or laptops
And I forgot to mention another part of KOffice which is awsome and I miss in OOo: KPlato for project management.
“As usual stability is a major concern as well.”
That’s why it is still a beta, and it will remain a beta until it is stable 
Crashes are treated with high priority currently. ODF support is also important, but please note that there are bugs in OpenOffice.org too, we have developers who do some testing on KOffice and OOo and then report the issues to OOo and/or fixes them in KOffice depending on which is wrong.
Yes it is
I work in a medical and academic environment and I use OpenOffice running on Linux for creating all my documents (mostly technical manuscripts and presentations), which I save as ODF. I would rather use an office suite that runs natively on Linux/KDE, but unfortunately KOffice still lags behind OpenOffice. The most important features KOffice should have are: (1) ODF compatibility, and full file compatibility with OpenOffice; (2) the capacity to acceptably open and save documents in the MS Office format; (3) simple, intuitive interface that does not impose the use of automatic formatings for creating documents.
Well … KOffice is going forward. Good.
However I never quite understood the sense of this project in the first place. If there is any reason to prefer it over Open Office I’d like to hear of it. But at least it doesn’t get in the way. Well done.