Full Disclosure:
I'm not unbiased. I have a KDE-CVS account although regrettably haven't done much with it. Wrote some documentation for Kivio and have helped out on a KDE stand. However, there's no point wearing rose-tinted glasses, the purpose of this review is to show the state of KOffice as it stands today.
This article has been written because I think there is a lack of information about KOffice available. At a recent tradeshow it was apparent many people had adopted OpenOffice as a de-facto standard without realising there is a powerful alternative that is better integrated with KDE.
Whilst I won't pretend that KOffice has reached the same level of maturity as OpenOffice but it is extremely usable. The 1.3 release makes substantial improvements but to make further progress the project needs both users and developers.
Lack of users means relatively little testing and no feedback to the developers. KOffice has now reached the stage where it has a mature core and is usable for many everyday tasks. Please read this review and, if it has the features you need, consider trying out one or two applications. You never know, you might like it!
I don't believe for one moment that any of the problems I mention are beyond being fixed.
Why do we need KOffice when OpenOffice is available? I believe competition is good. KOffice has some components OpenOffice doesn't, such as drawing and database functionality. KOffice has a smaller codebase than OpenOffice, so it should be easier for new developers and people wanting to try new ideas to get to grips with.
The KOffice Applications
The KDE Office Suite consists of a word-processor (KWord), spreadsheet (KSpread), presentation tool (KPresenter), vector graphics (Karbon14), flow charting (Kivio) and report generation (Kugar). Supporting tools include KChart for graphing, KFormula for mathematical equations and KTheasurus to provide thesaurus functionality.
The database application, Kexi, is under heavy development and will be reviewed separately once it nears release. I didn't have time to include Kugar in this review.
Other components, project management (KPlato) and image manipulation (Krita) are not ready for everyday use yet although Krita is showing signs of reawakening. [Update on Krita]
All the applications share a similar user interface, it looks very minimalist and uncluttered belying the fact that most of the applications now have more functionality implemented than you might expect.
Common features include the ability to multiple views of the same document, these simultaneously update and show different portions of the same document or an enlarged area of a document. Multiple levels of undo/redo, print previewing and document metadata are also standard features.
The majority of the applications are written as KParts which means they can be embedded inside other applications. So if you want a diagram inside your spreadsheet you can simply embed a Karbon14 object and get full vector drawing capabilities. An application called the KOffice Workspace lets you manage documents from all the KOffice applications but has no facilities for saving or printing collections of documents so its usefulness is limited.
More impressively KDE's filemanager, Konqueror, can also act as a container for KParts. This means that an KOffice document can be previewed within, a very handy feature. It's this level of integration makes KOffice attractive to KDE users.
Being KDE applications there is a high-level of consistency, all applications start with a similar dialog offering a choice of a blank document or a selection of pre-defined templates. The configurable toolbars and print preview features will already be familiar to KDE users.
Table of Contents
Introduction
KWord
KSpread
KPresenter
Kivio
Conclusion