FosdemKofficeTalk

very rough notes

How many use KOffice or know it well? About a dozen hands go up. KOffice uses KDE technologies making it lightweight. 1.5 will include a project management application, KPlato. Currently we have productivity (Kword, KSpread, KPresenter, Kexi), creativity (Kivio, Karbon, Krita) and supporting apps (KChart, KFormula, Kugar). Standards compliant with native support for OpenDocument and extendable though plugins.
It's impressive how complete KOffice is and it takes up little space interesting for distributions who want to stick to a single CD. Good desktop integration compared to OpenOffice.

Becoming a professional office suite. Kexi is very impressive and not getting as much information as it deserves. Krita is extremely impressive, most active programmers in the suite. Seamless integration.

OpenDocument is an important point. One of their developers is on the OASIS committee that makes OpenDocument. Committee made OpenDocument more independent of any program. KOffice was the first office suite publicly available with OpenDocument support. The choice of an office suite is often based on being able to open documents. Microsoft is also working on an XML format that they want to standardise but it has been shown that this format is tied to MS Office, so even though they document the format it's not easy to be compabile because it has some binary content that is not easy to process.

Not just bundling of applications, very well integrated. Can be used to create combined documents.

Lightweight, 1000K lines of code, OpenOffice has 5000K lines of code and KOffice has twice the components.
Accessibility is a key issue for use by disabled people and governments. During 1.5 process a lot of accessibility work. Integration of KTTS Text to Speech. The accessibility work was not difficult to do, just some integration work done by one person.

Krita is rocketing to fame, first release for 1.4 with only basic functionality but now provides all kinds of stuff up to 32 bit colours in any different colour model. The Photoshop alternative.

Kexi is a database application, the MS Access alternative. Can connect to many databases, also just one file databases using sqllite.

How many using OpenOffice as main office suite? More hands go up. OpenOffice also has database but it stores database schema within database itself. Kexi are working with OpenOffice to make a file format and interoperability for databases. It's also runs on Windows and the windows version is on the Kubuntu live CD. KexiDB translates between different dialects of SQL.

All of KOffice will be available natively on Windows for the KOffice 2 release.

Screenshot of migrating Northwind access to Kexi. Kexi can also import MS Access databases (can't export but you want to get away from MS Access).

He works with replacing proprietry systems with Open Source systems and there is a large move away from vendor lockin which is seen as MS imposing on them.

KOffice has native OpenDocument support, not via a filter plugin. 1.4 included it but they wanted more testing so it was not default. In 1.5 it is the default.

KOffice is the future, he has been involved with it for more than two years now. It is the youngest office suite but most advanced technology making it maintainable. Available on 64 bit platform natively. Linux distributers do a lot of work to package OpenOffice, it's very hard to maintain. Openoffice has better exports to KOffice formats though. KSpread can import Excel files better than OpenOffice does. KOffice is a product of the community, not people employed to work on it. It has ease of use and a beatiful user interface.

Point that OpenOffice does run on 64 bit, just not natively so not full access to memory etc. KOffice just runs. KWord also lets you import and edit PDF format.

Does KPlato support MS Office files? Not yet. Still a basic project management application included as a preview in 1.5 release, a more full version will be released with KOffice 2. There is an effort going on to make a standard file format that complements the other OpenDocument formats. Task Juggler also working on that.

Questionner works donig migrations for charities to Free Software. Anything to help with migration? Macros can't be imported but Excel files can be automated to turn into OpenDocument.

Any further work going on in import filters for MS Word? It's not dropped in favour of OpenDocument. Excel filter has seen a lot of improvements. Word filter is dependent on an external library, wv. To make a big effort on this they might need to break away from that library or extent that library. Very aware that there is the need to import proprietry formats. They are lacking developers for those filters, working on binary formats it not fun.

Can extensions be done in KJSEmbed? Kross is a full scripting interface new in 1.5. KPart plugins work but is it possible with javascript because that is needed to get round binary compatibility?

Any plan in OpenDocument to have a standard macro format since that is a big problem for compatibility between office suites. Probably not at the moment, but difficult since Macros depend on the design of the office suite heavily.

Any plans for a macro recorder? It's certainly planned.