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Wednesday, January 10th 2007, 7:43pm

KOffice App Communicate

This is a kinda broad question, so I will explain it's reason first.
I just switched to Kubuntu Linux from Windows XP and all the windows apps that a poweruser would typically have.
In my migration, I have found suitable replacements for every task I need and want to do on my laptop, so I'm good there. There is one app that I cant replace, and thats OneNote 2007 and Outlook 2007. I LOVE that team, but I'm not even going to go thru the brain damage of getting an emulated xp running (via QEMU), or using wine. No Thanks!
I can live without that team of apps, but instead I figure my computing world is all Open Source now, why not roll my own! I thought about OO and evolution, but man does that look like a round hole and a square peg!
I posted here about development efforts, and learned a bit about the core and focus of KDE in general. Interoperability. I liked that, so I figured I'd give KOffice (the whole thing) a try.

To my question. I seems as though KOffice is behind OO in some areas so much so that wirking with the Windows world will be quite bothersome. I opened my business card templates, one created in MS Word 2000, and the other in OO 2.0.4, and KOffice broke them so much the it would have been easier to start from scratch, whereas OO eats MS Office files very well........finally.

1.) I know that KOffice is an ever growing and maturing project, but I wonder , is there is enough attention being paid to it playing nice with it's more popular friends.

2.) Do the individual KOffice apps communicate with each other at least as well as MSOffice? The thing that makes the team of OneNote and Outlook so slick is the communication between them and the desktop. I know that MSOffice is no universal translater when it comes to data communication. It is more of a round hole and square peg that most realize, which if KOffice isn't at least as good as MSOffice in data communication, I may never get my way in Linux...

See, quite broad. I'm hoping that the more knowledgable folks here can lend some insight.
If you need clearificaton on any of this, post it here and I'll do my best.

Thanks
Keith

bram85

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Location: Eindhoven

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Thursday, January 11th 2007, 3:25pm

RE: KOffice App Communicate

The KOffice team is aware of these problems. The first problem is because of lack of manpower... there are almost no people maintaining the import and export filters. The second problem is also known and if I'm right this is something to be taken care of in the KOffice 2.0 series.
Bram Schoenmakers
KDE Netherlands (www.kde.nl)

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Thursday, January 11th 2007, 3:45pm

RE: KOffice App Communicate

So should I take your answer to #2 to mean that the apps do not communicate as well with each other as they should, but this is being activley addressed?

As for playing nice with the other kids....
I'm new to Linux so I'm not aware of many of the tools and solutions available. Is there a way to get word docs cleanly into KO? Maybe a command line tool to convert MSWord to rtf or html or xml, then pull that file format into KO.
Frankly, I have always thought MSW is a bit overkill for most people, and the fact that the file format keeps changing adds to everyone elses headaches.

I looked, but I can't find a timeline for the path to KO 2.0.
Is there a projected stable date? Are we talking 6 weeks, or more like 6-12 months?

Thanks
Keith

This post has been edited 1 times, last edit by "WorkingOnWise" (Jan 11th 2007, 3:46pm)


bram85

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Posts: 948

Location: Eindhoven

Occupation: Software Engineer

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Friday, January 12th 2007, 7:03pm

RE: KOffice App Communicate

No, certainly not in weeks. Your second guess comes much closer.
Bram Schoenmakers
KDE Netherlands (www.kde.nl)