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 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 - To get out of this list, please send email to majordomo@suse.com with this text in its body: unsubscribe suse-linux-e Check out the SuSE-FAQ at <A HREF="http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/"><A HREF="http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/</A">http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/ and the archive at <A HREF="http://www.suse.com/Mailinglists/suse-linux-e/index.html"><A HREF="http://www.suse.com/Mailinglists/suse-linux-e/index.html</A">http://www.suse.com/Mailinglists/suse-linux-e/index.html

Michael Perry wrote:

David-

Many thanks for the review. The koffice suite sounds quite interesting to me. I know that filters take a long time to mature. I think applix's filters are still doing that since I seem to have issues almost daily with them. After comparing staroffice 5 and applix, it seems that staroffice has better overall filter support. Now if it would just load quicker the first time. I sometimes think it forgot to launch on my P166. As a note on my Dell Inspiron Pii 366 mhz with 128mb of ram, 8mb agp card, it still is poky. Just what kind of system does SO5 want?

SO5 works just fine on my AMD K6-2 400Mhz w/192megs RAM. It takes 10-15 secs to load which is not bad considering. Loads all MS Office97 stuff just fine. -Dee - To get out of this list, please send email to majordomo@suse.com with this text in its body: unsubscribe suse-linux-e Check out the SuSE-FAQ at <A HREF="http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/"><A HREF="http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/</A">http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/ and the archive at <A HREF="http://www.suse.com/Mailinglists/suse-linux-e/index.html"><A HREF="http://www.suse.com/Mailinglists/suse-linux-e/index.html</A">http://www.suse.com/Mailinglists/suse-linux-e/index.html