KOffice - The Other Office Suite for Linux

Michael J. Jordan
Linux Online Staff

July 7, 2005

Usually overshadowed by the OpenOffice.org suite, KOffice offers all that the Sun Microsystems sponsored office suite has plus a little more. In some cases, though, it may offer a little less.

Installation

Binary packages can be found for popular distributions like Mandriva, Ubuntu and the various Red Hats. There are links on their 1.4 release announcement

In my case, my main workstation is running Fedora Core 3 and KDE 3.4 on the desktop. First, I had to update my KDE 3.4 to 3.4.1. If you're running Fedora Core 3, this is extremely easy if you have the 'yum' system set up. If you haven't got 'yum' set up, it's pretty easy to get that working.

In the interest of being brief, I'll just tell you to go to: http://kde-redhat.sourceforge.net/. This page explains how to set up your 'yum' to get the latest KDE.

Since KOffice is brand-spanking new, I wasn't able to get it via 'yum', but it's easy enough to download the RPMs and install it by hand. The first try, though, I had to resolve some dependencies. In my case, I was missing the mathml fonts, the little cms system for color management and wv2, a library to import Microsoft Word documents.

I did: yum install mathml-fonts lcms wv2

and after I was able to install the KOffice RPMs.

Using KOffice

You can start KOffice with the KOffice workspace, but it's best to start each individual application separately due to a bug that I'll talk about further along. At any rate, after installing it, you'll see separate icons for each one - and they are numerous. There's a lot here to use.

I am of the opinion that word processing is probably the single most popular computing endeavor, so your first stop will probably be the word processing application, KWord.

This application can do anything that any other popular word processing application can do. You can create documents using any number of layouts, styles and formats. You can also open any Microsoft Word document created since version 6. I have a lot of documents created with MS Word 2, which I used way back in the Windows 3.1 days and I'm sorry to report that KWord couldn't open them. Of course, I may be the only odd ball with a lot of 12 year old Word docs, so that's nothing to hold against KWord. KWord is a pretty powerful application, so the reverse is true as well. You can create documents in a number of formats, including the new 'Oasis Open Document' format. You can find out more about this format, which aims at standardizing office suite documents, at : http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/office/faq.php

I did run into a few glitches. Since KWord can import PDF files, I tried opening just one at random and it caused the application to crash. The other one was a rather large and complicated document in OpenOffice format. The outcome was a little more severe this time, causing a lockup that ended in my having to reboot the machine.

One of the things that KWord is missing, compared with OpenOffice, is an option to export to PDF. That's kind of a drawback, since PDF is such a popular format. PDFs are readable by anyone with a computer.

I did notice the fact that you can export a document to Palm format to be read on Palm's eReader application. I take my Palm almost everywhere and it's nice to know that I can export some documents and beam them to the Palm. Since most of us occasionally have to do some waiting (at the doctors, dentist, etc.) this means you can peruse important documents without having to be in front of your workstation.

The bottom line on using KWord is basically this: If you're creating your own documents, you'll be fine. If you're importing simple, straightforward documents from other formats, you should be OK. If you want to import some complicated documents, you may have problems.

KSpread

KSpread is the financial spreadsheet program for KOffice. I didn't see anything particularly challenging about working with it. There were a few things that I noticed worked differently, but nothing that would make learning to use it impossible.

I have a few Linux based spreadsheet programs and a number of spreadsheets I've created over the years. I didn't have any problems opening the Gnumeric spread sheets I had. Since I don't use MS products, and I don't have any Excel spread sheets lying around, I did a little Googling (filetype:xls +budget) and picked up a number of other people's spreadsheets. Let me take this opportunity here to thank some people for leaving their financial information on public servers so I could carry out my experiments with KSpread. I managed to open nearly every one of the spread sheets I had tried. Though Google returned 130,000 results, suffice it to say I didn't try every one. Of the dozen or so Excel files I opened, two caused KSpread to crash.

OpenOffice spreadsheets though were a bit more disappointing. I have quite a few of my own and KSpread crashed every time I tried to open one.

Now that we've seen some examples of how KSpread works with other sheet formats, it's time to see how it works on its own.

KSpread comes with several spread sheet templates that should come in handy. There are templates for a balance sheet, an invoice and various other common financial documents.

To try it out, I whipped up a simple sheet for a lemonade stand. Everything worked fine getting this simple sheet up and running. I entered my expenses and my earnings and then figured out my profit. It was pretty simple. Then, I tried saving the spread sheet to various other formats. The trouble I had opening sheets created I OpenOffice didn't occur when doing the reverse. I was able to save the sheet in OpenOffice format and then open in with OpenOffice without any problem. Excel was a different story however. KSpread would not let me save my simple spread sheet in Excel format. That's going to be a bit of a problem if you're creating sheets for people who only use Microsoft Office.

KPresenter

A Word Processor, spread sheet and presentation software form the holy trinity of most office suites. For slide presentations (unfortunately known in most of the world as Power Point Presentations), the KOffice suite includes an application called KPresenter. Making a slide presentation is pretty straight-forward, especially if you have experience making these with other applications. I whipped up a sample presentation in fairly short order. My artistic skills are pretty lousy, but it was easy to get a basic slide show running in no time.

If you're thinking of exporting your KWord presentation to Microsoft's proprietary format, you'd better think again. There is a project that forms part of Google's 'Summer of Code' to import Power Point presentations, so maybe that feature will be available at some point in the future. I did somewhat successfully convert it to OpenOffice's Impress format. I opened it, but I did lose a fancy-shmancy transitional dissolve and the background colors were a little off. But if you're putting together a typical presentation of the types I've seen at academic conferences, it should be portable. There's even an option to export a presentation to a memory stick for use on Sony projectors that support this feature.

I think you'll find KPresenter to be one of the strongest applications in the suite. I found that there wasn't a very steep learning curve to get up to speed with KPresenter.

Kivio

Kivio es a flowchart program originally developed by TheKompany.com. It now forms part of the KOffice suite. I must admit that I don't do a lot of work with flow charts. My liberal arts background never really prepared me to work in that spatially-oriented way. For those who use them, flowcharts are an indispensable tool to outline processes and to show people how things move from point A to point B and so on. I created a simple flowchart, which you can see in the screen shot below, with relative ease. The pages of these flow charts can also be exported to various image formats like jpg, png and even the huge bmp. They can then be used on web pages or in presentations. You can even export a page to a encapsulated postscript format (eps) and then convert it to a PDF. This should make it easier to hand out to colleagues. I'm sure if your job includes having to create flowcharts, Kivio will come in handy.

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