KOffice
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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 KWord screenshot |
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| Developer(s) | The KOffice Team |
| Initial release | 1998 |
| Stable release | 2.1 / 2009-11-24[1] |
| Written in | C++ (Qt, KDELibs) |
| Operating system | Linux ,Windows and MacOS |
| Platform | Cross-platform |
| Available in | Multilanguage |
| Development status | Active |
| Type | Office suite |
| License | GPL, LGPL, BSD license and others |
| Website | www.koffice.org |
KOffice is a free open source office suite which is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. It contains a word processor (KWord), a spreadsheet application (KSpread) and a presentation program (KPresenter).
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[edit] History
Initial work on KOffice development began in 1997[1] with KPresenter, with KWord[2] following in 1998.
In 1999, KOffice was cited in testimony in the United States v. Microsoft anti-trust trial by then-Microsoft executive Paul Maritz as evidence of competition in the operating system and office suite arena.[3]
The first official release of the KOffice suite was in 2000 when it was released as part of KDE 2.0[4]. Versions 1.1 followed in 2001[5], 1.2 in 2002[6]
KOffice has undergone a major transition in recent years as part of the release of KDE4. Coinciding with the work on KDE4, the KOffice team prepared a major new release, KOffice 2 which used the new KDE4 libraries. Although version 2.0 was released in 2009, the release was labelled as a “platform release” which was recommended only for testers and developers, rather than production use, since the release was missing key features and applications from the previous stable release series.
This continued with version 2.1 in November, 2009. Regular end-users requiring a stable environment are still recommended by developers to use the stable 1.6 release series.[7] In particular, both Kexi and Kivio have not yet been migrated into KOffice 2. Given this Ubuntu ships version 1 as the default KOffice, but gives users the option to select KOffice 2 if they so desire.
[edit] Features
KOffice was originally written for Linux but, as of version 2, also supports Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. KOffice includes the following components:
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KWord | A word processor with style sheets and frame-support for DTP-style editing of complex layouts. |
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KSpread | A spreadsheet application with multiple sheet support, templates and more than 100 mathematical formulae. |
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KPresenter | A presentation program with image and effect support. |
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Kexi | An integrated data management application, designed as a Microsoft Access or FileMaker competitor. It can be used for designing and implementing databases, inserting and processing data and performing queries. It has limited compatibility with the MS Access file format. |
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Kivio | A programmable flowchart drawing program with dynamically loadable stencils. Developed by theKompany, which offers additional (non-free) stencils for sale. |
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Karbon14 | A vector drawing application with a variety of drawing and editing tools. |
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Krita | (Formerly known as Krayon and KImageshop). A bitmap graphics manipulation program, primarily designed as a painting program, with some image processing features. |
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Kugar and KChart | Integrated report and chart generators. |
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KFormula | An integrated mathematical formula editor. |
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KPlato | A project management application that can create Gantt-style charts. |
[edit] Competition
The main office suite in use today is Microsoft Office[8]. Microsoft Office has been released for Windows and Macintosh but no version to date has been released for Linux. In addition, users of the open source operating system have typically expressed a preference for open source software.
In order to meet the demand for a Linux-based office suite, several projects have produced open source office suites for Linux including OpenOffice.org, GNOME Office and KOffice. OpenOffice.org is likely the most popular office suite for Linux[9] as it ships in the default installs of the two most popular Linux distributions, Ubuntu and Fedora. However, OpenOffice has drawn repeated criticism for its speed[10] and memory usage[11]. Given this, KOffice and GNOME Office remain popular alternatives on KDE and GNOME, respectively.
[edit] Technical details
KOffice is designed to work with the KDE platform, using the Qt and KDE libraries. All its components are released under free software licenses and use OpenDocument as their native file format when possible. The latest version of KOffice is 2.1, which was released on November 24, 2009. KOffice is released separately from KDE and can be downloaded at the KOffice homepage.
KOffice is undergoing a large overhaul to use Flake and Pigment as much as possible within applications. KOffice developers plan to share as much infrastructure as possible between applications to reduce bugs and improve the user experience.[2] They also want to create an OpenDocument library for use in other KDE applications that will allow developers to easily add support for reading and outputting OpenDocument files to their applications.[3] Automating tasks and extending the suite with custom functionality can be done with D-Bus or with scripting languages like Python, Ruby, and JavaScript.[4]
[edit] See also
[edit] References
[edit] External links
- KOffice website
- #koffice
- KOffice mailinglist
- First look: KOffice 1.5
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