KOffice 2.0.0 tagged for release

MS Office Support

Openoffice reads/writes MS Office documents. KOffice needs to have this support to compete, IMO.

Don't know if V2.0 will have this capability, either built-in or via a plugin.

Competition with OpenOffice

Just as KDE 4 became great 1 year after the initial release, KOffice will probably be developed rapidly as well from now on. We can't know if it will become better than OpenOffice, but in any case OpenOffice needs some serious competition from another OSS project, in order to further improve. So it's a win-win situation:)

Not supposed to have MS Office compatibility

I think I recall reading somewhere that the developers do not place MS Office support very high, rather they are focusing on ODF support. But I may be wrong.

Stability

Last time I tried koffice 2.0 (both the word processor and krita, the raster image editor) would crash constantly. I think it was the last beta before the release candidate packaged with Ubuntu Jaunty.

One of the most important features of any software is it's stability. I'll give it a whack once the final comes out, but as long as it crashes frequently it can't even begin to compete with other software.

If I remeber right there was no Koffice 2 devs there would make the support but stated if someone else would set up and make the code for them the devs would accept the code. Correct me if I am wrong

KOffice has lean 'n' mean, I like it

Gotta say, I like KOffice. At work I use OpenOffice because it's so good at MS Office file format compatibility. And OpenOffice is definitely a nice office suite to use.

Unfortunately, OpenOffice (like Microsoft Office) is a mondo DRAM hog. That's where KOffice comes in.

System resource usage with KOffice is considerably less than OpenOffice. That's because of the shared library effect. Works great on low-DRAM machines especially. It's snappy and does a very nice job.

But what about MS Office file interop?

I've put schoolkids on KOffice. I told 'em, just save to RTF in MS Word (that's 98% of MS Office usage by schoolkids). Then the kids just bring the RTF file home and keep working on it in KOffice. Works great.

Besides, for me, I prefer ODF over Microsoft's Uh-Oh-XML.

RTF

There is no plan to make MS file format compatibility a priority. Compatibility with MS-Office is a deliberately moving target and a waste of resources.

At worse it makes a good combination tool with OpenOffice

Koffice is a lot broader Office suit than OpenOffice. It has a project manager and image editors in the RC1 that are not in OpenOffice.

If Koffice is stable install both. Use OpenOffice for MS compatibly. Use Koffice to expand the features. Koffice also works well in combination with kontact the integration between them is lot closer than the integration between Thunderbird and OpenOffice.

Thinking either or is not good thinking when the two programs have unique features.

Excellent project

KOffice 2 has shown excellent word processing compatibility with OOo for a couple of months now.

I'm looking forward to this release as I'd like to abandon OOo for general work (but keep it for the still necessary format conversions)

I don't think we an have our cake and eat it regarding ISO document standards. Either we encourage everyone we know to work with ODF or we give up and live with moving targets.

What would be the "pragmatic" alternative? A generic ODF2OpenXML filter? Good luck with that.

seen on alt.os.linux.slackware

> I don't use any word processor on a regular basis. But
> I need to convert customer files (usually doc) to a variety of formats,
> including TeX. In this respect I hoped that the Kword conversion to Tex
> (LaTeX to be precise) had improved. Instead it had disappeared.

Targeted Audience

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.

KOffice 2.0 will be useful for some users, but since it is the first
release in a long series it is likely to contain bugs and
incompatibilities.

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, in most cases better implemented and more efficient. Also, not
all applications which were part of KOffice 1.6 made it into KOffice 2.0.
The missing applications will return in 2.1 or possible 2.2.
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So this situation looks to me like the KDE4.0 debacle all over again.