KOffice 2.3.0 Office Suite Released

[phoronix]

Phoronix: KOffice 2.3.0 Office Suite Released

While there is now the Calligra Suite following an internal KOffice fork by its developers, having been released today is KOffice 2.3.0 that includes the work leading up the formation of Calligra. KOffice 2.3 features include Krita being certified as ready for use by professional artists, better support for reading Microsoft Office files, a new report engine in KPlato and Kexi, and much more...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=ODk2NA

[smitty3268]

Calligra's first release will be version 2.4, as far as i know.

[kraftman]

It's good to see Krita is developed so rapidly!

[schmidtbag]

so i don't really get what the point is of koffice. why not just use open office? what does koffice offer that openoffice doesn't? if its for better kde integration then the developers could just spend their time working on openoffice instead and continue a program that has a lot more dedication, and is more completed.

[panda84]

so i don't really get what the point is of koffice. why not just use open office? what does koffice offer that openoffice doesn't? if its for better kde integration then the developers could just spend their time working on openoffice instead and continue a program that has a lot more dedication, and is more completed.

Then ask to Open Office developers to speed up its start up time, memory footprint, fix its crappy VCL toolkit (http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/VCL_UI_Rework), and create a mobile / touch version (http://freoffice.blogspot.com/).

Never investigated, but I'd bet it would be really difficult to do, if not impossible.

Sometimes it's just better to start from scratch.

[pingufunkybeat]

so i don't really get what the point is of koffice.

It's a free office suite for the Unix desktop.

why not just use open office?

Because of maintainability, resource consumption, portability, and because people who are good at coding for KOffice would not be good at coding for OpenOffice.

what does koffice offer that openoffice doesn't?

It runs on netbooks and mobile phones, for example.

if its for better kde integration then the developers could just spend their time working on openoffice instead and continue a program that has a lot more dedication, and is more completed.

OpenOffice is an Oracle one-man-show. The ability to help as an outside contributor was always limited, and required a copyright transfer, if I'm not mistaken.

We'll have to see how LibreOffice fares now that they've forked. OpenOffice is internally a horrible mess that only Sun/Oracle guys really understand.

[schmidtbag]

i suppose those are pretty good reasons but does it offer all, or most of the same features? i might even consider switching to it depending on how well its doing. i would say one of my main gripes about openoffice is how long it takes to start up and updates for it are pretty huge in file size (although compared to ms office, its tiny)

[panda84]

what does koffice offer that openoffice doesn't?

forgot to mention:

• a professional drawing application (Krita);
• a good vector drawing application (Karbon), OpenOffice.org Draw is more for diagrams like Kivio;
• a project / Gantt management application (KPlato);
• an application to gather notes and ideas (Braindump, which will get into KOffice / Calligra distribution in 2.4, and already is based on it).

[panda84]

i suppose those are pretty good reasons but does it offer all, or most of the same features? i might even consider switching to it depending on how well its doing. i would say one of my main gripes about openoffice is how long it takes to start up and updates for it are pretty huge in file size (although compared to ms office, its tiny)

Well, as always, it depends. Krita, Kexi and Karbon are already pretty usable, other could be not suitable for average use. However progress is clear:

http://www.koffice.org/changelogs/koffice-2-3-0-changelog/

[pingufunkybeat]

Koffice (or Caligra) does not have feature parity with OpenOffice, and probably never will.

If you need basic Office functionality, and don't need perfect import of MS formats, KOffice might be good for you. The main strengths of Koffice are excellent integration (embedding of spreadsheets and graphics, etc.), clean design and modest resource requirements.

OpenOffice looks like an alien on every operating system in the world, and is slow as molasses. Very featureful and mature, though.