Other Applications

There are other applications that make up the suite. These are normally embedded into the word processing or spreadsheet programs in other office suites, but KOffice, being more modular, keeps them separate.

Kugar

Kugar is a report designer. Like Kivio, it was originally developed by TheKompany.com. It's based on an application called Metaphrast. There is a tutorial in the help section that will give you a good start on how Kugar works.

KChart

KChart is an application to create graphs based on data. I did a simple test by importing a text file with comma separated values. It did a fairly good job of importing the data. You can also edit it. Unlike some of the other KOffice applications, KChart has a good help files which are clearly explained.

KFormula

KFormula is an app for (yes, you guessed it!) creating mathematical formulas. The files can then be exported to Tex format, MathML and a number of image formats (PNG, JPG, etc). In fact, I created a simple formula and I exported it to Tex, MathML and PNG and the application worked very nicely.

A Final Evaluation

I think you'll find, as I have, that KOffice as a package is not as polished as OpenOffice, the other popular, free office suite for Linux. To illustrate this, when I opened applications in the KOffice workspace, I couldn't save anything that I had created. As stand-alone applications, most of the separate parts of KOffice work reasonably well, KWord, Kivio and KPresenter being the strongest. Despite having a stable number, KOffice 1.4 could still use a bit of work. Importing files from other formats is always a tricky business. Since Microsoft doesn't invite everybody to look at their proprietary formats, it's no fault of the KOffice developers that you can't open everything. The documentation, however, is something that the KOffice people could work on. Programmers are famous for not liking to write documentation, so again, this isn't an exclusive problem with KOffice. Good documentation is lacking across the board in the Linux world. Since this fact could be the subject of a whole article, we'll just sum up by saying that some bugs and a lack of documentation for newcomers makes KOffice still not ready for prime time.

Michael J. Jordan is Webmaster of Linux Online. He can be reached at Michael.Jordan**AT**Linux.org