A look at KOffice 2.0 Beta 3

The KDE office application suite, KOffice is getting closer to its 2.0 release. Beta 3 was announced November 19, with another beta due any day. The final release is expected early next year, so it seems like a good time to take it for a spin.

The beta releases are available for Kubuntu Intrepid Ibex (8.10), making it relatively easy to try out. There are also openSUSE and Debian packages available as well as source code (of course). The author didn't look forward to trying to build KOffice on his normal Fedora 9 desktop, so borrowing an Intrepid laptop from the wife was in order; after that enabling the "Unsupported Updates" and installing the koffice-kde4 package (which didn't seem to work through the GUI, but apt-get worked just fine) is all that it took.

The initial impression was a bit rocky as most of the small handful of ODF files that were opened caused KOffice to crash. It is a beta, though, so some of that is to be expected. Trying again with the imminent Beta 4 and filing bugs for failures should be high on the author's list. The one presentation file that successfully opened in KPresenter seemed to have lost much of the formatting that was present in the original, which was also disheartening.

It should be noted that the author is hardly an office suite "power user". Normally, OpenOffice.org is used for minimal business documents (invoices mainly), simple spreadsheets (expense reports, football pools), and boring, bullet-list slides for presentations (as anyone who has been to one will attest). By and large, these simple needs are met by OpenOffice, with the added bonus of being mostly able to open the various Microsoft-format documents that unfortunately cross the desktop. Any other office suite with similar capabilities would serve just as well.

Opening spreadsheets in KSpread provided the most reliable experience when opening existing documents, but there were still a number of problems. Formulas did not calculate automatically regardless of the auto-recalculate setting, but the data was there, unlike some of the other document types. KWord seemed to be unable to open any of the ODF documents tried, crashing in all cases. One "handy" .doc file opened, but the formatting and contents were mangled; OpenOffice can reproduce the formatting of that document pretty well. KWord also crashed on exit from that document. Perhaps betas are not the place to try opening existing files.

There clearly are many new features in KOffice 2.0, but the major ones, porting to KDE4/Qt4 and using the Flake object library throughout, are infrastructural in nature—they aren't obvious to users. Much like KDE 4.0, it would appear that KOffice 2.0 is a launching pad for subsequent releases.

There is an emphasis on a consistent user interface between the various applications which does stand out when using KOffice. For better or worse, the OpenOffice interface is fairly consistent between applications as well, but seems more cluttered, or more poorly organized somehow. Using Flake everywhere will be a boon to those who are power users as it treats everything as a "shape" that can be transformed (via scale, rotate, skew) and moved between any of the separate applications. Vector graphics can cohabitate with raster graphics and text easily.

Using KOffice 2.0 is fairly straightforward for simple tasks. It is noticeably slower than OpenOffice on the same hardware. Opening files, even empty documents seems to take an inordinate amount of time. Even moving around within KSpread or KWord seemed sluggish. Presumably these are things that will be fixed, whether that will be in the next few months or for KOffice 2.1 remains to be seen. This beta gives the impression of great promise, but not yet a very usable tool.

Of course, there is more to KOffice than just the three applications mentioned. The database application Kexi is not yet part of the KOffice 2.0 release, nor is the Visio-like flowchart program Kivio. Two drawing applications, Karbon14 for vectors and Krita for raster graphics have been released with the beta. Other than a quick startup to see if the interface was consistent with the rest of the suite—it was—the author didn't try them. The same goes for KPlato, the project management and planning application, though it has a rather different look—no toolboxes on the right hand side—likely because of its very different needs.

Perhaps unfairly, the author expected a bit more from this beta release. It would seem there is still a fair amount of work to do before the final 2.0 version, but there are still a few months left. For whatever reason, previous attempts to use KOffice had always caused the author to quickly switch back to OpenOffice. Even though there were so many problems, this KOffice—or more likely 2.1—somehow seems more plausible to switch to. Another look in a few more months is likely called for.