Hey all,

I've heard a lot of good things about KOffice...but I'm wondering to myself; why should I switch from OpenOffice? What does KOffice provide that OpenOffice does not?

I think to some degree, you will have to answer that for yourself, since every user has different needs.

I use koffice on a daily basis to store my grades (using kspread), write my lectures (in kword), and occasionally to draw figures for a test or exam (in krita). I have tried both Abiword and OpenOffice.org as alternatives, but I always come back to koffice primarily because the performance is so much better. In particular, I open and close applications frequently and (in my experience) koffice applications have very quick start times.

I also appreciate the integration with KDE's printing system, which makes it a lot easier for me to take advantage of my printer's duplexer and to produce slide handouts that are "4-up".

However, for me the biggest advantage is the ease of writing custom plugins that can access powerful KDE technologies such as Nepomuk and Akonadi. For instance, last night I wrote a plugin in C++ that lets me click a button and add the current document as an attachment to a Korganizer calendar, post it on my course web site, and add it to the submit system database I use to allow my students to turn in their work. It took me about four or five hours of coding time and a little help from developers on the IRC channel and it's working great. It will save me lots of time when classes resume.

Probably, for you, that last advantage isn't what will make you want to switch. But there are lots of other reasons to try it out. If you can spare the hard drive space, why not play around a bit and see what appeals to you. Keep in mind that koffice is still beta software right now. It does crash on occasion. And some of the features need a lot of tweaking to be considered truly user-friendly or user-ready. It's maturing fast, though.

If you are thinking about KOffice2 as a replacement for OpenOffice, stick with OpenOffice for the time being as it is not yet ready for production use though it can be used very successfully for quite a lot of things. I use KWord and KCalc for a variety of things where I am never going to send the files to anyone else and I have minimal formatting requirements.

In due course, I think people will find the speed and integration of features very compelling and there is no reason not to use it for the things it can do now if you are happy to match applications to task. Some people prefer to use a single application for everything,

I was interested in Nokia's (and KOffice's) recent annoucment of microsoft office import filters, which should make KOffice far more usable.

I do like the older KOffice design; it's simple and dosent really clutter up anything. Love to play with KOffice 2.1 but alas, this machine needs to remain stable.

Can I get feature comparison with open office & MS office?

Most of the features that most people expect and use in an office suite will be present in both OpenOffice and MS Office. Of course MS puts a lot of energy into MS Office to make it as polished and feature-rich as they can, and that much is noticeable. On the other hand most (casual) users won't miss out on much by using OpenOffice which does a good job at providing a fairly feature-complete office suite. Things get a little hairy if you are operating in a predominantly MS Office document environment wherein there may be some degradation in the documents opened by non-MS Office programs, and MS Office doesn't handle ODF.

OpenOffice.org and MSOffice are about a 95%, or maybe a little more, match in terms of function and feature, in a lot of cases. At least that has been true in the past.

If you use the MSOffice or the OpenOffice.org XML file formats, that % goes down quite a bit. They're pretty much different animals. Both have "Open" in the description and name of the file format, but are not the same otherwise. OpenOffice uses Oasis which conforms quite nicely with W3C emerging standards. The MS ODF uses a proprietary wrapper on the XML. They both work quite well, except with each other.

If you use the formats that are common between them, then there's really strong interoperability, but you lose whatever advantage there may be to an XML-based format.

I usually use KOffice for as much as I can, but when I bump into limitations or bugs I revert to OpenOffice.

OpenOffice to me has far more features than I feel ever likely to use, and in my experience is more stable, and except for loading speed perhaps, performs more quickly in use.

So why do I use KOffice first? Because Open Office operates more or less like three or four unrelated apps (like the 1990s microsoft products it mimics) while KOffice strives to provide a fresh paradigm in interface and structure where each "document" can have active pieces of different functionality made and edited within it. Rather than making and editing a matrix of content in "Excel" and then cutting and pasting it into "Word", you can make and edit the matrix right on the word processing page (or the word processing can be done right on the spreadsheet page).

As the KOffice developers rightly take pains to point out, KOffice isn't ready for general use yet, it still takes a high threshold of bug and slowness tolerance, but I am enjoying getting used to its fresh approach to what an office suite should be if it were designed in the twenty-teens rather than the nineteen-nineties when RAM and multitasking abilities limited apps to having only one specialty at a time.

Also it is worth pointing out that the Karbon and Krita features and canvases, while having all the same advantages as the "core" office parts, are well beyond OpenOffice functionality, and better compared to Inkscape, GIMP, or Corel/Adobe products. There again, there is significant development yet to be done, but the meshing of functionality is again KOffice's strong point.

Thus I would suggest a reason to try KOffice now is for a glimpse of the future of KOffice. Whether or not you would use it in preference to other options yet (as I do) is just up to your own situation though.