It's a sign of the quality expected of software nowadays. A few years ago some of the features in KOffice would have been absent from a top-tier office suite.
Whilst writing this review, I suddenly realised that the KWord was doing everything I wanted. All the keyboard shortcuts I was using from my experience with other word-processors worked. The program behaved as I expected and I was whizzing around my document, being productive and enjoying the experience.
KOffice 1.3 is usable. KWord and KPresenter are both at a level where I could do useful work with them. In fact, I'm growing to like KWord the more I use it. Given a usability clean-up most of the other applications would be vastly improved.
It would be a real shame if KOffice continues to be neglected, it has all the makings of a very powerful office suite. The KParts technology is amazing, it works incredibly well. Most of the features in KOffice work and the programs in the suite are stable. What it needs is more people using it on a day-to-day basis and reporting bugs and a more developers to improve the user interface and add the missing features.
When writing a review it's easy to get obsessed with features. Most people only use a fraction of what's available in a modern office suite. It's very easy to think KOffice has too few features to be useful when in fact what's there covers a lot of use cases.
Looking at how other parts of KDE have come on in leaps and bounds in a relatively short space of time I'm extremely, perhaps naively, optimistic about the potential for KOffice. There's a very solid foundation, it (just) needs a more developers on-board.
In the Next Release, Whenever That May Be
Since I follow the developer's mailing list for KOffice it was very tempting to litter the review with "this will be improved in the next release." Unfortunately nothing is assured but the following noises have been made about the next version:
- Replacing the current spelling system with a better implementation capable of support multiple languages
- Ability to import mail merge data from Kexi into KWord, apparently you can now import data from KSpread
- Replacing of the text editing in KWord to provide better support for kerning and right to left languages. This will probably happen when Qt4, the underlying toolkit which KDE is based on, is released.
- Making the default file format the same as OpenOffice enable transparent exchange of documents between the two suites.
- Talk of rewriting KSpread's core engine to better handle large spreadsheets.
- A new formula parsing engine for KSpread that will hopefully provide better error messages
- The ability to enter measurements in any units
Looking at the CVS version of KOffice just a month after the release of 1.3 and there are already improvements, usability enhancements to Kivio, work on OpenOffice filters for KWord and code-cleanups to KSpread. The effects in KPresenter have also been overhauled. All this being carried out be fewer than ten people. Unfortunately none of the things I've listed as missing features or the wishes on bugs.kde.org are ever likely to get fulfilled unless more developers join the team.
How You Can Help KOffice
Use it! KOffice isn't an academic project or a piece of blue-sky research. The aim of the project is to create a useful suite of business applications. If it's unusable it has failed.
Download KOffice, use it for your everyday tasks and report any bugs you find to bugs.kde.org.
- Improve the documentation
- Translate it
- Design some icons
- Contribute: clipart, stencil sets, lists of frequently mis-spelt words, templates
Write some code. My guess is there are under thirty frequent contributors to KOffice, you could easily make a significant impact on the project. Any code you can contribute will be greatly appreciated. There are plenty of tasks, and a very supportive developer mailing list.
Colophon
The machine is used for the review was a homemade system based around a Shuttle SK41G, AMD 1.1Ghz Duron processor, 384Mb RAM running kernel Linux 2.6.1, XFree 4.3, KDE 3.2 and KOffice 1.3.1.
The review was written using KWord and the website produced using Quanta. The Plastik style and window decorations were used for all screenshots.
Comments and feedback are welcome, please email kde@zurgy.org. The KOffice Website can be found at www.koffice.org