Hello. For fear of bumping a 3 month old thread I decided to start a new one. Like the other poster, I too don't want this to sound like a troll post, I simply want to ask:

Do you use KOffice? If so, why?

Well I used to do that. It started very fast and was very easy to work with. I liked to preview documents in konqueror.
When I switched to kde4 I switched to beta 2 and then I couldn't use it any more... Beta releases can be buggy
I'm hoping for new releases because I really liked koffice (kubuntus last release is beta5).

I would very much LIKE to use koffice, but kde-4.2 has left it in tatters. Some of the applications have updates that work, but the suite itself, including desktop integration, is not functional.
Koffice fills an important role that OOo cannot. While OOo is a good product, it is unapproachable for casual users. Koffice is more visual and intuitive.
And now, the latest update to Ubuntu-8.10/Intrepid threatens to remove koffice altogether. So I cannot update. I hope this is not going to be the end of koffice.

doctordruidphd wrote:Koffice fills an important role that OOo cannot. While OOo is a good product, it is unapproachable for casual users. Koffice is more visual and intuitive.

I find it interesting that you say that. For me, the reason I'd rather not use OOo is that it's such a heavyweight beast, so I'd like to use something lighter like Koffice. But whenever I've tried it, I've found it very un-intuitive.

I'd call myself a casual user; I only need an office suite to create the very occasional spreadsheet or text document. I don't think OOo is easier for me because of its similarities to Microsoft Office as I didn't use that a great deal in my professional life, but somehow it seems easier to get it to do what I want than I've found with Koffice.

And in truth, as someone who's more likely to need to read documents sent to me than write them, OOo's ability to cope with a wider range of document formats makes it more useful. (Though at least Abiword is a fairly lightweight reader for text documents).

I still use KWord 1.6.3 under KDE4 because it doesn't have the overhead of OO for writing letters and notes and I will often do drafts of things I might later put into OO because it is so much easier to use.

I also use it for .txt conversions because, either way, it is superior to any other program whether the source or destination is Linux or Windows.

I use it for finding obscure Unicode characters, like the ticks in tick boxes. These aren't available in OO; so I open KWord and, as long as I am using the same font, copy the character from KWord to OO.

Finally, I use it when I want to mix a Hebrew or Arabic word in an English text, something OO cannot handle.

Right. Due to ebuild problems I cannot install the entire KOffice, however I have installed KWord.

My first impression was that it started up faster. I tried adding a table. Eww. Sorry, that's not intuitive at all. Neither is adding pictures. Bullet pointing and lists were fine though. I didn't find an easy way to change font/font size to a specific value either. It seems as though almost everything in KWord has a frame around it - and all of these frames have handles which give me the false impression that I can modify them. How dare they.

Sorry, not a very good impression so far. Am I missing something?

The only koffice app I regularly use (and love!) is krita.
Kword 1.6.3 is ok if you need to write a letter or something simple, but it is not possible to write a book on it (ok, it is possible, but your mental sanity will be on high risk).
I'm very impressed with koffice 2 betas, though. I think koffice 2.0 will not be able to catch me but 2.1... who knows? There is a nice set of features, good integration (the flake concept is neat) and... well, it looks better on kde...
Give kword a style management on par with Writer, and I'll be happy.

I use Kword, (version 2 beta 6) just to to see how pretty it looks and how it crashes when opening about 80% doc files or to see how it shows the resting 20% in an unusable way (a page per line, or weird text line widths, for example), 100% rtf opening crash and several odt crashes too, besides a 100% crash frecuency whenever I try to save a document; so for me is a pretty toy but nothing else.
When I need to really work with documents I launch MS Word vía Wine.

Manolete wrote:When I need to really work with documents I launch MS Word vía Wine.

Outch! That hurts... Other than it is ugly, what's wrong with Writer?

mcNisse wrote:When I switched to kde4 I switched to beta 2 and then I couldn't use it any more... Beta releases can be buggy

Why don't you change back to koffice for kde3?

RGB wrote:

Manolete wrote:When I need to really work with documents I launch MS Word vía Wine.

Outch! That hurts... Other than it is ugly, what's wrong with Writer?

Haha, sorry it wasn't my intention.
I don't use OOo for several reasons:
- It's heavy like an elephant
- I hate GTK (yes, I know it's possible to "QT-ize" OOo, but still)
- Writer doesn't import 100% correctly .doc files if they contain tables, subtables, title and paragraph formats, etc.
- I'm an idealistic and faithfull guy who always expect next Kword release will manage to be functional.

So, since I know Koffice guys are brilliant and cool, and it's just a matter of time we can enjoy complex text processing, including basic musical notation, integration with Krita, and a lot more bellezze I'm just expecting to have that wonderful and shiny functional release to finally convert all my doc fines to odt and say goodbye to doc format and MS Word for ever and ever till the end of time!

Riinse wrote:

mcNisse wrote:When I switched to kde4 I switched to beta 2 and then I couldn't use it any more... Beta releases can be buggy

Why don't you change back to koffice for kde3?

Well, because I want to test the betas.

Manolete wrote:When I need to really work with documents I launch MS Word vía Wine.

Then you are missing the very best program for producing quality documents - LyX running on top of LaTeX. Though he is no longer involved with it, it was originally created by Matthias Ettrich, one of the founders of KDE, and like KDE, it is built on QT4 - the perfect partner to KWord for shorter documents.

I used kword a lot, but since going to kde4 and version 2.0 (beta-7 in my case . . .) I find it to be much less useful.
Unlike the previous version (Kword 1.6.3 for instance), the present version does not open htm(l) files and pdf files and rtf files make it crash.
It's actually quite disappointing because I like the lightweight nature of kword.

Maybe there are file filters, but I can't see any at the web page if they exist.

I hope the developers are looking here, since I can't quite figure out how to communicate with them.

peacenik wrote:...
I hope the developers are looking here, since I can't quite figure out how to communicate with them.

I would not believe it You could communicate with them through IRC #koffice or use mailing-lists [1].

[1] http://www.kde.org/mailinglists/index.php#koffice