Michael Perry wrote:
>
> How about a review so far of your feelings about the state of koffice.
> I would be interested in usability issues, how its interface appears,
> etc. Can you give me an idea what is attractive or interesting about
> koffice? I will probably download and try it at some point. Right
> now, I am enjoying gnome on suse 6 quite a bit. I dont mind running
> both and after seeing some posts about koffice will most likely grab it.
>
> Does the word processing part do imports and exports?
First I should say that KOffice is still alpha, so there is much that
doesn't work yet. I think some of the apps are further along than
others, but I haven't spent much time going into each one. The best
description of its features can be found at the KDE web page, but I'll
give my impressions here. The basic idea of the suite is that you'll be
able to move projects around easily from one app to another (like kword,
kformula, killustrator, kspread, kimage, kpresenter, kdiagram) i.e.
inserting a formula written in kformula into kword and then putting all
this together with images from kimage into a presentation in kpresenter
(you get the idea).
The interface is quite nice, there seem to be a lot of features
available in each app, and everything follows the standard KDE look and
feel (and eventual help system). I don't think you'll have any problems
finding your way around KOffice.
As for KWord, it seems to need a good bit of work yet. The spell
checker doesn't work for me. The import and export feature is minimal
at best (according to the developers, this is going to take a long time
to work out). An interesting strategy for KWord is that everything is
in a frame, even text. What this means is that you should be able to
easily insert, say, graphic images into your text anywhere you like and
shape the frames such that you can include text all around the images.
In other words you could put a small image right here <X.jpeg> and fill
up all the space around it with text with little or no effort. I have
not quite done this successfully though I have been able to insert
graphic images (just can't write around them yet - maybe there is
something I don't know how to do yet or maybe the feature hasn't been
fully implemented?).
The developers state that you should be able to write papers with KDE
though you might not want to trust it yet with anything of too great of
importance.
Overall, the project has made a nice start and there seems to be a lot
of support for it. It is not ready for office use yet (like applix and
star office), but it should be sufficient for limited home use. Given
the amount of progress made on KDE I am quite optimistic on the future
of KOffice.
David Bellows
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