Ya know.... the developers went to a lot of trouble to NOT make it very easy to get a workable install of Koffice 2.0 beta. .mine is less than a week old.

I know, I know, it is called beta because it is not considered ready for public consumption...

I'm an early adopter.....some folks say I should have been adopted OUT! waaaaayyyyy OUT!

Anyway.... I'm a heavy user of Linux Koffice and did not have a distro that would provide a 2.0 suite, so I hung around and hung around and groused...and finally went off and installed Fedora, but wasn't really happy with that and so decided to do a new distro LXDElite... based on Debian Lenny and between the developer and noodling around have a nice lite distro with 2.0 beta installed.

When, a few months ago, I saw the first screenys of 2.0 I.........WANTED IT.......and now.......I GOT IT!!!

I've reported a bug about it crashing when one tries to "undo set background" dunno if it is me or what, but otherwise.....

I'm LOVIN' IT!!!

If folks don't mind I'll pop in once in a while to report on how things are going.

woodsmoke

There is a reason that they call it beta and distributions don't include it yet, you know.

Hi
I haven't been around much because there isn't much that I can "do", since I'm just a hardware and applications kinda guy, but I thought I'd report on my Koffice use.

The "interface" for Koffice is a "hand and wrist" saver for me, the right sweep of a mouse as opposed to moving the mouse up and over saves me a lot of strain, so I use Koffice almost exclusively for "production".

Basically, there are three ways that I use Koffice: a) the "normal stuff", b) production of "presentations" for use in the college classes that I teach and c) production of e-books for home school students.

a) The "point" about "a" that I have argued for years, when discussing OO/LibreOffice and Koffice, is that when one is just "making a paper thing" or "making a digital thing" one does not have to "interact" with a MS product. In other words, MS products may have formatting things that are not readable because MS chooses to do so and yes, if one has to interact with a MS product then one should probably use OO/LO if one needs across the board capabilities. But, espcially if one "just produces stuff" then the Koffice suite is admirably designed to do that.

b) I teach college biology, environmental science and physical science and use Kpresenter to produce the original slide shows, text etc. That, then, is exported to LO and images are added etc. and that then is saved in .ppt format to use in the full bore MS classrooms.

MS, with Win 7 products has created a situation which they "say" is a "bug" in that if one changes a slide produced in an Open format and then saves as .doc the MS puts a "wrapper" around some slides randomly and says that they are irretriveably corrupted and has replaced them with a "blank slide'. This is not correct and I have demonstrated it to the college but am ignored, but...anway...if one does not "interact" with a presentation in the Win7 system aside from "showing" it then the thing works fine.

Many have asked why I go to the "trouble" to do this. Why not just use OO or LO?

I choose to do so as my small way to support the open document movement.

The STUDENTS....see...on the introductory slide...."Koffice" logo and etc. And, I also, at the end of the slide show have a "last slide" which has a few bullet points about Koffice. In that way they have at least heard about the suite.

As a side note the colleges grading system produces a "excel" tab delimited spreadsheet to work with offline and that is readable by Koffice as of now, but that may change when the college moves to the new version this fall, don't know.

b) For the electronic texts it is the same. I produce the original document in Koffice, and I USED to then export to LO and then export as a .pdf. Charts etc. are produced as "images" and then embedded in the document.

However, a couple of iterations ago, Koffice started exporting pdfs that did not lose formatting and I now just export the book pdfs directly from Kword.

The only "real" problem with that model is that "multiple column" formatting does not export to OO/LO, so I do any column formatting that I need in OO/LO.

I also use KDEpim/KOntact etc.

PLEASE NOTE: the only "problems" that arise do so when one is having to "move" the material into another system, usually MS.

To reiterate: if one is just "making" stuff then the Koffice suite works just fine.

The "problem" is not with Koffice. The "problem" is with closed, proprietary, systems.

So..... to sum all of this up for somebody who might be considering the Koffice Suite:

a) the interface is a wrist saver
b) it works.
c) if you do not "have" to interact with MS materials, like a pptx etc. then it provides a work product that seems to meet the requirements of "most" users.
d) the user is doing their bit to support open documents as opposed to TALKING about supporting open documents.

If there was a emoticon that was a "hats off" to the developers I would place it here!

woodsmoke

To put it in a short post.

MS is now "reading" odp presentations! woah!

With the full upgrade, by the college, to Win 7 and latest MS office, MS now just blanks whole presentations when saved in .doc or .docx when one makes any kind of change to the presentation.

This is as opposed to the previous situation in which MS said that "several" slides were irretriveably corrupted.

Again, one finds that the file size has increased and that there is some kind of "wrapper" or "script" included somewhere, I have not been able to physically find it, perhaps some kind soul can enlighten the author.

Also, one can, indeed, take the supposedly corrupt ppt to another machine at the college which has not actually seen the ppt before and it will read it with no problem.

Apparently, the script is unique to the machine. The author does NOT know that for sure.

For this semester, as a test, several small "test" presentations and a full presentation..were exported...directly from Kpresenter as an odp.

These were placed on a cd and taken on the cd to the college.

Upon attempting to display the presentation; MS produces three "complaint" boxes, in succession.

Notice that the author is working....FROM THE CD. Do NOT move the presentation to the computer's drive.

The "complaint" boxes each in turn says that the presentation has some kind of problem and does one want to "fix" "cancel" or "open(at your own risk)" and when one clicks "open" in all three complaints it does, indeed, open and display.

One "caveat" is that not all animations will play, and that is possibly because the computer is reading from the cd and there is not enough memory. But... an animated .gif, if it is small, will play within the odp presentation from the cd.

It is recommended to not try using a memory stick.

MS can write to a file on a memory stick.

MS cannot write to the file on a cd.

After the semester is finished some experiments with "locked" presentations will be made and see if they can be surreptitiously, somehow, written to by MS or not.

But, to repeat. An odp presentation saved to a cd will be shown by MS powerpoint after going through three complaint screen and selecting "open" in all cases.

woodsmoke.

PPS:

As a pps note:

Actually, the author does not really have "as much of" a "problem" with what MS is now doing, ( other than an intellectual abhorrance of predatory practices ) compared to what it used to do which was a) not open an odp at all.

to wit: MS now

a) actually allows the use of an open document presentation, which MS would not do before.

b) MS does have to make money, it is a corporation that is requred to do that. Three "nag screens" is an irritant, but it is "workable".

The un-aware user, who MS targets, would probably not actually try all three options, and finally end with clicking "open", but some will.

In the first two cases MS, or a third party vendor, then gets to heroically "save the day", after the un-aware user spends some MORE money, but at least the situation is doable.

And, more and more users are becoming "aware". So this situation will "save some face" for Microsoft and will reduce the number of complaints from the FOSS community. But, seeing that the author has no clue about the intentions of MS, one does not know. But at least at this juncture it is "workable" by the aware user.