What does features does Koffice give you over Open Office and vice versa. I have heard that Koffice is not compatible with MS Office. If so why would anyone want to use it over Open Office?
Well koffice does blend in well with the rest of KDE, but other then that I see no real reason to use it instead of openoffice.
Speed
Better handling of .txt to .odt conversions
The whole Unicode sequence. There are several characters which are used in MS Word documents which are not available in OpenOffice but by opening a KWord document and importing them from KWord, it is possible to include them in an OpenOffice document.
I like KOffice better because it blends well with KDE and more light weight than OpenOffice. However, it is practically difficult to use only this office suite because MS Office format compatibility is very limited now and there is no such promises to have full support.
OpenDcument format is supported and it may be possible to use this suite once more people start accepting OpenDocument standard. (Even M$ Office started supporting it even though current support is of pathetic quality).
Right now (and for the foreseeable future) it’s no contest. Use OpenOffice.
On the contrary, I use KWord all the time for letters, my own notes and drafts because it is so much quicker and easier to use than OpenOffice and isn’t contaminated with bad habits from MS Word. If I need to send a .doc file to anyone, I open the same file in OpenOffice and save it out as doc.
The only things for which I use OpenOffice as first choice are when editing a .doc or WordPerfect file from someone else or when using multiple languages where OpenOffice is way ahead of KWord.
Hi,
Koffice is a great option unless you need the msoffice compatibility, in which case OpenOffice is probably the best choice, Abiword is also a nice lightweight word processor, with (limited) msword compatibility.
Don’t feel you have to choose one and stick to it, you can have both and use each for different purposes.
I personally use OpenOffice, as many of my lecturers choose to save everything as msword documents.
Regards,
Barry.
I normally use OpenOffice. The last time I used KOffice was about a month ago. Believe it or not OO Calc had got in a terrible mess with one of its spreadsheets. Kept wanting to restore it and crashing when I tried to open it. Opening and then saving it with KSpread resolved it.
I’m glad to have both.
Isn’t that annoying? I’m at the Open University, and they not only require you to send them electronic documents in .doc format, they send them back as .exes.
You would have thought a blinking university would see beyond this ‘it’s popular so it’s the right standard’ numbskullery by now…
I don’t find it that annoying, as I just open the MSoffice files in OpenOffice.
They even have OpenOffice installed on all of the computers in the labs.
I can see it would be annoying if they required me to work with only MSdoc files, or sent files as .exe. But luckily I’m not required to submit anything as .doc files, I submit either on paper or as pdf (unless it’s source code of course).
Regards,
Barry.
There’s also Abiword, not to mention emacs and vi of course rotfl!
Nothing against KOffice but I took the original question to mean which one was the better allround, fully-featured office suite…
Of course, I didn’t think to mention Emacs, and LaTeX.
Since discovering LaTeX, I spend less and less time using word processing applications, and more time in Emacs.
Regards,
Barry.
In my office, CVs sent in anything other than text or PDF format are rejected.
I know about some universities also following this.
In IIT (Indian Institute of Technology), Madras (Chennai): Usage of .doc and other M$Office files are “banned” in the computer science department.
Yes, in spite of its name, the Open University is anything but open; I first wrote to the Vice-Chancellor about this in 2000 and most recently in 2007 when I was doing a course. They do promote Star Office as an alternative to MS Office and they are in the process of moving to Moodle but there is a widespread expectation that everyone is running Windows.
That’s pretty much the norm, I was surprised to see that during my studies they actually kept such things in mind in the ‘global’ way of thinking. Too bad they deviated from it with normal courses.
Macs however are taken into account while I doubt their market share is any higher than that of Linux over here.
Sounds like a good example to follow.
Hi. OpenOffice feels much more mature than KOffice does. I agree with koffice.kde.org when they say
In version 2.1, most applications and components have improved significantly but should still only be used by early adopters and probably not as the primary worktool. …] ** It is not aimed at end users, and we do not recommend Linux distributions to package it as the default office suite yet. **
Of course. There’s only 24 hours in the day rotfl!
Exactly. KOffice isn’t ready for serious use. There’s Abiword (and probably Kword) for those of simple needs and who don’t collaborate with anyone other than Linux users. For everyone else, OOo, with all its faults, is the only serious contender.
I have several sizes of screwdriver and a set of watchmaker’s screwdrivers.
Which one should I use for serious work?