ON TEST OFFICE SUITES
KOffice
KDE S
OWN OFFICE
JONO BACON
When I started using Linux about four years ago one of
the most requested applications was a good quality
office suite. Back then, everyone knew the technical
sophistication of Linux, but productivity on the desktop
still hadn't been addressed. This of course changed in
the succeeding years as people collaborated to bring the
productivity that a system such as Microsoft Windows
offered, but with the many benefits of Linux.
The first project to bring a desktop application that seamlessly hooks all of the separate
environment to Linux was started by components together into one coherent package.
the KDE Project and its' founder Mattias Although KOffice already has the major compo-
Ettrich. At the time there were some licensing nents needed in an office suite, it doesn't stop
issues with the Qt toolkit (the software that KDE is there. A company called theKompany is currently
built upon) and as a result of this the GNOME project sponsoring developers to work on KWord, and will
was founded to provide an alternative. Although Troll also be developing the following applications (all, of
Tech, the company behind Qt, has resolved many of course, open source):
the licensing issues (such as making Qt GPLed) both " KImageShop (renamed Krayon by popular demand)
projects are now developing at full steam. " Kivio (Visio type program - new to KOffice)
Since KDE was first started, developers have been " Rekall (MS Access type program - new to KOffice)
encouraged to write integrated software that fits into Many more companies besides theKompany are
the KDE environment both in look and feel. This is so paying developers to work on KOffice and KDE to
that if a user knows how to operate one KDE applica- ensure development can continue apace. Let us not
tion he or she should have no problem with the oth- forget that anyone can contribute to the KOffice or
ers. One such project that was started was the KOf- KDE project. Details about contributing can be
fice project. The aim was simple; to create a suite of found at http://www.kde.org/.
productivity applications that run natively under KDE
and integrate well. Currently KDE is heading towards
First Impressions
its 2.0 release with the fourth beta being released at
the time of writing. KDE 2.0 should be ready as you When considering this review of KOffice we
read this. Part of the 2.0 release will be the first public need to bear in mind that it is still development soft-
stable release of KOffice. ware currently whose developers are currently in
KOffice currently sports a number of applica- bugfixing mode. I have been running KDE and KOf-
tions that the business and home user will find use- fice out of the CVS at kde.org for a number of
ful. These include KWord (a DTP/word processor), months now, so the version I am reviewing is the
KSpread (a spreadsheet package), KPresenter (a pre- very latest copy at the time of writing. Although
sentations package), KIllustrator (a vector-based KOffice is development software, this is no excuse
illustration package), KChart (a tool for creating for the expected feature selection and design, but
graphical charts) and the KOffice Workspace, an bear in mind that it is not yet finished.
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OFFICE SUITES ON TEST
Once KOffice has been compiled and installed
an entry is placed in the application launcher that is
is displayed when clicking on the "K" button on the
KDE panel. This is a good start as it puts the suite in
an easily accessible place. Inside the 'Office' entry is
each application in KOffice as well as the KOffice
Workspace. You can choose either to run each
application seperately, or run the integrated Work-
space application from which all the components
are easily accessible.
The KOffice Workspace can be seen in Fig 1.
Each component in KOffice is called a part and as
you can see in the figure, each part is shown down
the left hand side. To load one of the parts you sim-
ply click on one of the icons. This then loads the rel-
evant program seamlessly into the space on the
right hand side.
To review KOffice fairly, we must consider two
aspects of its performance:
" How each application works seperately
" How all the applications work together to form a
suite
We will start by looking at the first aspect and see-
ing how each application in KOffice works indepen-
dently. Please remember that KOffice wasn't fin-
ished at the time of writing, although but it should
be finished by the time you read this review.
KWord
When you launch KWord it presents you with a
number of different templates that you can use as
the basis for your documents. There are also options
for opening an existing document or not using a
template at all. At the moment, the templates seem
rather limited and simply format the page size and
columns. More sophisticated templates may be
developed in the future.
KWord offers most of the features that a user
would need for basic text editing and also has a
number of features for more advanced publishing
work. It offers an advanced frames-based publish-
ing platform which users of Framemaker will proba-
bly appreciate, and this works rather well. Although
some of the features in KWord were buggy due to
the fact that it was still development code, I found set as some other spreadsheets, but remember that [top]
Fig. 1: The KOffice Workspace
KWord to be an impressive application. this is a first release. I suspect a flurry of extra fea-
One criticism you might make of KWord howev- tures to be added in the future. There are a good
[above]
Fig. 2: KSpread has powerful chart-
er concerns its interface design. Some features variety of mathamatical and formatting functions.
ing capabilities too
required a bit of hunting to locate. These issues will Users of Microsoft Excel should have no trouble
no doubt be fixed in future releases. converting to KSpread as the interface is similar yet
still intuitive.
KSpread
KPresenter
Out of all of the KOffice components one of the
best is undoubtedly KSpread. One of the first things KPresenter is the KOffice application I find the most
that hits you about it is its feeling of maturity com- useful as I often have to make presentations. KPre-
pared with some of the other companants. KSpread senter supplies a number of useful features that are
is a full featured spreadsheet package that holds its well designed into the interface. Most functions that
own fairly well in comparison with the others. the budding presenter needs are there including
Admittedly it doesn't boast as complete a feature effects, drawing mode, autoshapes, and drop shad-
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ON TEST OFFICE SUITES
Fig. 3: KPresenter  all you
need to produce professional
presentations
Another area that the KPresenter developers
need to look at is the performance of screen presen-
tations. Effects such as scrolling text when viewing
the presentation are rather slow. Overall though,
KPresenter is a good quality application with a
bright future.
KIllustrator
KIllustrator is a simple yet effective vector drawing
tool. The program lets you assemble a variety of
primitives including circles, rectangles and triangles
Fig. 4: KIllustrator,
together with text and other objects to form
a powerful vector
images. KIllustrator really comes into it's own when
drawing package
creating artwork for use in a KWord document.
ows. One problem though is that KPresenter cur-
rently lacks additional views, unlike a program such
Fitting the pieces together
as Powerpoint. This can be a shortcoming if you
want to see all of the slides to get a general overview With any office suite, the whole should be greater
than the sum of the parts. The applications should
be integrated so that you can share data between
StarOffice and Open Source
each component and embed this data into any type
As is now well known, Sun Microsystems, which recently purchased StarOf- of document that you can create using the suite. An
fice, has now made it open source. The question is, what does this mean for example of this is if you are writing a report in
you, and for KOffice? KWord and need to include the contents of a
One of the many benefits of Open Source is that code from one project can spreadsheet created in KSpread to provide some
be usedin another project. This encourages a culture of sharing. The Linux background figures. KOffice implements this fea-
community has always believed that it is futile to re-invent the wheel. By ture very well.
open sourcing Open Sourcing StarOffice Sun has made it possible for devel- Some explanation of how KOffice does it may be
opers to look under the hood and see how something has been implement- of interest. X Windows (and the common Linux
ed. This is a benefit to both users and developers as elements of StarOffice implementation XFree86) has limited support for
could now be used in other projects. One area that would be an obvious sharing complex information between programs so it
benefit is that of import/export filters which are used to achieve file com- is largely left up to the desktop environment or win-
patibility with other document file types. dow manager to deal with this. KDE was one of the
The open sourcing of StarOffice was a far-sighted move that will benefit first desktop environments to successfully implement
the development of both KOffice and gOffice. It makes it likely that we the sharing of information between applications and
shall see some interesting developments in these office suites in the future. the KDE team have developed a number of technolo-
gies to cater for this  one of the reasons why KOffice
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OFFICE SUITES ON TEST
Info
The KDE home page:
http://www.kde.org/
KDE mailing lists:
http://lists.kde.org/
%
Fig. 5:KWord, showing
an embedded spreadsheet
and graphical image
is so fast. KOffice gets its lightning speed from using would recommend that you keep your eye on this
these advanced library functions in the code to share open source project as I think we will see some
and manage information that the applications are interesting developments in KOffice over the com-
dealing with. Some other office suites such as StarOf- ing months. %
fice share data between applications by implement-
ing a sharing framework (called an object model)
Running KOffice
within the suite itself. The problem with this is that it
is incredibly slow. KOffice is considerably faster than If you would like to give KOffice a whirl there are a couple of options avail-
virtually every other office suite I have tried. able to you:
The practical method for sharing information " Install the pre-compiled binaries
between applications is as simple as clicking on an " Compile it from the source code
icon and selecting the KOffice component. You can Bear in mind that KOffice requires KDE2 to run or one of the KDE2 betas.
then select the size of the area where the embed- You will also need Qt2.x.x. See the KDE home page for more details on
ded part will live (see Fig. 2) and either create a new installing KDE2.
document in the part or load an existing document. Installing the binaries
Each embedded part is fully functional as if you This is the easiest method. Go to ftp.kde.org and download the relevant
were using the application standalone. package for your distribution. Using your package installer, you can then
Another area where KOffice works particularly install the KOffice package. For example, for RPM on Red Hat:
well is in integrating tightly with KDE itself. KOffice
rpm -i koffice-1.0.rpm
was built specifically for KDE and therefore shares
the same theme that you are running. KOffice inte- Note: the package name may differ from that shown above.
grates into your application starter and co-operates Compiling the source code
well with other KDE applications. This is a benefit If you choose to compile the source code you have a further two options.
over other office suites if you use KDE, just as gOf- The first is getting a source code package. You do this in the same way as
fice works well with GNOME. getting a binary package as shown above. Get the package from
ftp.kde.org and install it. You then need to go to the directory where the
source code is and compile it by typing the following commands:
Overall Conclusion
./configure
KOffice looks like a firm foundation for an office
make
suite and performs well in terms both of speed and
make install
usability. But although KOffice is good, it isn't (yet)
great. KOffice lacks some features that some users The other way to get the source code is to use anonymous CVS access to the
may take for granted if they are used to other office KDE CVS server. There isn't the space to describe this procedure here, but
suites. Of course, this review is based on a develop- instructions can be found on the KDE home page. http://www.kde.org/.
ment version of KOffice, so by now the features I If you have any questions or queries you can ask using IRC on #kde at
found to be missing may have been added. irc.openprojects.net (my nick is [vmlinuz]). You could also try subscribing to
KOffice could well develop into a serious office one of the KDE mailing lists.
suite that will rival the current ruler of the roost. I
2 · 2000 LINUX MAGAZINE 41