Guest post by The Calligra Office Suite has announced its second snapshot release. The project, which is a fork of KOffice, is building a suite of productivity and creativity applications and is working towards its first formal end-user release due in October. The project is seeking feedback from end users particularly in the area of usability of the GUI. With this snapshot Calligra Office Words is claiming better compatibility with .docx than LibreOffice, and also claims to be approaching the best compatibility with legacy .doc formats.
The Calligra Office suite uses a separated, modular approach between the GUI components and the core office suite “engine” itself, which enables different GUIs to operate with the core engine. Calligra Active is the community project to adapt the Calligra engine to touch interfaces, for use on tablets and mobile phones. Calligra Active uses QML and so integrates with MeeGo, and in this snapshot Calligra Active can, for the first time, be used to view text documents, spreadsheets and presentations.
For Linux users wishing to check out and perhaps help to polish the emerging Calligra Office suite, test packages for this second snapshot pre-release are available for Ubuntu/Kubuntu, Arch, Fedora and OpenSuSe.
http://dot.kde.org/2010/12/06/kde-announces-calligra-suite
“The KDE community today announces the start of the Calligra Suite project, a continuation of the KOffice project. The new name reflects the wider value of the KOffice technology platform beyond just desktop office applications. With a new name for the Suite and new names for the productivity applications, the Calligra community welcomes a new stage in the development of free productivity and creativity applications for desktop and mobile devices.”
I think it is. Look at the comments in that link. And you can take a look at koffice.org, there is a blog entry about the different directions that developers were having. And because of that, they had to fork koffice into calligra.
It depends, I suppose, on your definition of the word, and on your viewpoint.
Certainly it has been called a fork.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODg4NQ
http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2010/12/rose-by-any-other-name.html
Apparently it was a fork caused by only one person, but it was still enough to call it a fork.
Edited 2011-06-23 03:39 UTC
I think the best indication right now of the “split personality” schizophrenic nature of Calligra/KOffice can be seen on the download page for KOffice.
http://userbase.kde.org/KOffice/Download
OK guys, I guess sort of a special fork, aka Spork.
BTW, I really wish the project(s) a lot of success. As mentioned previously, perhaps the engine could be interfaced to the web creating a Google Docs like experience.
http://www.webodf.org is interestng there. Seems to come from the same corner: http://www.fosdem.org/2011/interview/jos-van-den-oever
can iuse this on GNOME?
It isn’t released yet, it is only a preview “snapshot”, intended for users and developers wishing to help out in efforts to polish the GUI.
It is not due for release until October.
It has dependencies on Qt and KDE libraries. If you don’t have these installed, then they will all be installed along with Calligra Office.
Having said all that, even though GNOME’s support for integration of KDE applications is pretty minimal compared to KDE’s support for GTK applications, nevertheless, yes, you can run it on GNOME.
Typically it will take a little longer to start than a native GNOME application, and it won’t look at all like a native GNOME application, nevertheless you can run it. It won’t run nearly as well and as seamlessly as it would under a KDE4 desktop, but it will run.
Be warned that KDE applications are philosophically different to GNOME apps. KDE applications tend to go for completeness at the expense of increasing complexity, whereas GNOME applications typically go for simplicity at the expense of completeness.
http://www.datamation.com/open-source/gnome-vs.-kde-apps-which-is-b…
Personally, I prefer to install applications that can do whatever I might (one day) want them to.
YMMV.
Edited 2011-06-23 04:39 UTC
The two things holding open office suites back for me is the poor docx conversion and horrid interfaces.
The old ms office style of menu after menu is overkill and a horrid waste of time. It doesn’t have to be a ribbon, it just has to use the space better.
The final step is to make sure I can open my resume and it looks the same as it does in Word.
Technically this isn’t totally their fault; but Microsoft makes it very easy for people to keep relying on Office. When they can’t open documents they’ve created earlier and print out an exact replica they go right back to Office.
Office OpenXML really pisses me off…
These are the very two areas that Calligra Office hopes to improve on. This aim was stated in the first snapshot release:
http://www.calligra-suite.org/news/calligra-announces-first-snapsho…
For an indication of the state of play with regard to the Calligra Office suite GUI, there was a “Tour” posted at the time of the first snapshot release a month ago:
http://www.calligra-suite.org/news/calligra-2-4-snapshot-1-tour/
The GUI is one of the primary areas targetted for improvement, along with compatibility with MS Office, performance and layout. The existing GUI has widescreens in mind, and it is fairly consistent across the multiple applications.
This is actually a double standard, if you think about it. MS Office is, after all, absolutely abysmal at opening documents and having it look the same as in the originating application if that originating application was not MS Office. Abysmal. Utterly hopeless.
Edited 2011-06-23 05:48 UTC
Tables and weird formatting just never seem to convert correctly. I’ll install all the KDE libs just to get better docx conversion.
An included mobile version is a great idea too. I’m really looking forward to trying this out now!
You filled bug reports for Tables and weird formatting?
Many times. Doesn’t matter, as it seems .doc conversion is not on the top of their priorities. This is why people are forced to stick to M$, which arguably has gotten much better over the last few releases.
My experience is different. You should try to fill bug reports.
Ya know I hear this “meme” for lack of a better word, of MS Office being incompatible with itself but honestly I’ve never seen it and I mess with some seriously large docs with all kinds of funky formatting. I also have multiple versions of MS Office to deal with, with this machine I’m typing on running my beloved Office 2K while my home machine has Office 2K7 and my oldest has Office 2K3. I also had to deal with a project where I had people collaborating with Office 2K, 2K3, 2K7, and one on Office for Mac (2K4 I believe) and again ZERO problems.
Compare this to Open Office where I’ve actually seen family members get their grades dinged because OO.o turned out word salad when opened in Office 2K3, with broken headers and footers and when I was in school I myself got dinged because the teacher couldn’t open an Open Office doc with MS Office without it looking like a shotgun splattered mess.
This is why I only give LibreOffice (I swear, what is it with FOSS and lousy names? Caligra? LibreOffice? Gimp? what’s next, the Goatse video player?) to home users with the warning that as long as they are gonna print the results, or are just writing a doc for their own use? its all gravy. but if you are actually needing to share or collaborate with the outside world, or heaven forbid send a resume? Do NOT use a FOSS Office suite.
Oh and there is a DocX compatibility pack for MS Office 2K and 2K3 and it works quite well, I have NO trouble opening the files created with Office 2K7 and up. There are plenty of things to complain about when it comes to MSFT, but the quality of their business software ain’t one of them. there is a reason why despite “free as in beer” people would rather buy or pirate MS Office, and that is because it does make a difference when you have to share your creation with the outside world.
The only way you will get this is if you save your document in OpenOffice as an ODF document.
If you re-open such a document in OpenOffice, or any other OpenDocument-capable oofice suite except MS Office, then it will be absolutely fine.
MS Office, however, makes word salad of such documents. This is a failing of MS Office, it has piss-poor interoperability.
The simple solution for this is for OpenOffice/LibreOffice users to save documents (meant for interchange with other parties) as MS Office legacy formats (.doc, .xls etc). MS Office 2K3 does have a reasonable ability to open documents in these legacy formats. No word salad then.
A even better solution is to export documents meant for interchange with other as PDF files.
If you were interested in offering people decent advice, this is what you would tell them.
Edited 2011-06-26 03:31 UTC
The handling of MS Office formats (legacy or otherwise) in OpenOffice/LibreOffice is not even close to being trustworthy. I tested this myself with OpenOffice not so long ago, using forms, manuals and training presentations in .doc and .ppt formats. These were all real world documents, mainly produced by the UK government.
Not a single one of them kept its formatting intact when opened in OpenOffice and saved back into an MS Office format. A couple of the .doc forms (a job application and grant funding proposal form IIRC) were badly mangled, with the formatting a mess and some of the content unreadable. One seemed to have been corrupted be the conversion, as it wasn’t even possible to edit parts of it. The presentations lost various effects as well as having formatting issues.
Other documents were just mildly messed up, with formatting glitches and things out of alignment, but even that’s unacceptable when documents are expected to be perfect. I’d have looked utterly unprofessional and incompetent if I’d worked on those documents in OpenOffice and sent them out without checking the results.
That’s not an option when people have specifically asked for work in a particular MS Office format.
Thank you as that is EXACTLY what I was talking about! Not a single doc I saw mangled was saved in ODF, all were saved as .doc (the 97-2003 compatible setting I believe) in Open Office. I lost 15 points from a mangled Open Office doc, dropping the paper from an A to a C, and my oldest lost 10 points with the latest Libre office because of the same reason.
So it is as I said, if the ONLY thing you are doing is saving docs for your own use, or to print? Then FOSS Office Suites are fine. If you need to collaborate or heaven forbid send a resume (which BTW no HR dept will accept PDF, as their placement software uses keyword search that doesn’t work on anything but .doc) to try to land your dream job? Do NOT use FOSS Office suites, as they WILL horribly mangle even the most simple formatting. It has gotten better than the days of OO.o 1.x-2.x but that is like saying your horse costs less to feed now that its dead.
If you are getting graded, or collaborating, or have any weight at all attached to a document? Buy MS Office, hell even the student edition will do. Because if you send a .doc done by Open/Libre Office it WILL look like garbage when opened in MS Office. Personally I wish it weren’t so, as I give out libre Office on all new home builds and I hate how folks end up having to spend nearly $100 on Office Student just to get anything done, but ATM LO/OO just butchers the .doc format when opened in MS Office. If you don’t believe me do as Dave K did above, download any reasonably complex doc from any government website, edit in LO/OO and then save as .doc and open in any MS Office. You’ll see the thing gets all kinds of hosed.
My goodness you Americans are utterly spineless. I presume you are American, you clearly aren’t Brazilian or anywhere sophisticated like that.
If my son or daughter handed up a file which they could demonstrate worked perfectly, and their teacher was so incompetent as to be unable to open it, especially as a PDF, and the teacher further then had the audacity to try to penalise my son or daughter for the teacher’s incompetence, then I would petition to have that teacher sacked.
If the school resisted, I would take the case to the educational body that ran the school, and try to have the school’s funding revoked.
I am the customer here, and I am right. It is not up to my son or daughter to have to teach the school how to do IT. The school has not one leg to stand on here, given that the technology they needed to be able to keep up with the competence of their own students was free software which would cost the school absolutely nothing to install.
Who is supposed to be teaching whom?
Who is paying for the service of providing the education, who is paying for the teacher’s wages? … I’ll give you a hint, it isn’t the school.
Edited 2011-06-26 09:19 UTC
You have got it utterly backwards, completely the wrong way around.
Free software is completely able to generate and faithfully re-open the files, in many alternative formats, it is MS Office that almost utterly lacks the ability to do so. MS Office is abysmal at interoperability, it is utter garbage. If you are doing any kind of collaboration, MS Office should be avoided like the plague.
http://jimmywales.com/2004/10/21/free-knowledge-requires-free-softw…
“We produce a massive website filled with an astounding variety of knowledge. If we were to produce this website using proprietary software, we would place potentially insurmountable obstacles in front of those who would like to take our knowledge and do the same thing that we are doing. If you need to get permission from a proprietary software vendor in order to create your own copy of our works, then you are not really free.
For the case of proprietary file formats, the situation is even worse. It could be argued, though not persuasively I think, that as long as Wikimedia content can be loaded into some existing free software easily enough, then our internal use of proprietary software is not so bad. For proprietary formats, even this seductive fallacy does not apply. If we offer information in a proprietary or patent-encumbered format, then we are not just violating our own commitment to freedom, we are forcing others who want to use our allegedly free knowledge to themselves use proprietary software.
Finally, we should never forget as a community that we are the vanguard of a knowledge revolution that will transform the world. We are the leading edge innovators and leaders of what is becoming a global movement to free knowledge from proprietary constraints. 100 years from now, the idea of a proprietary textbook or encyclopedia will sound as quaint and remote as we now think of the use of leeches in medical science.”
Your recommendations are 100% the wrong thing to do in the best interests of nearly everyone on the planet.
Edited 2011-06-26 10:15 UTC
I don’t see how buying Office to produce .doc files is a bad recommendation. It is the most reliable way to do so, currently.
Buying MS Office to open files received from elsewhere, however, is the least reliable way to do so, currently.
There is no impediment to your buying MS Office and installing an alternative like LibreOffice alongside it. Furthermore, if you do this and your competitior does not and installs MS office only, then you have given your company a better capability, and hence a competitive edge, at zero cost.
Therefore, recommending exclusive use of MS Office is an extremely bad recommendation. If you were my IT consultant and you tried to tell me that I should install MS Software only, I would immediately dump you and go elsewhere.
Yes, in a perfect world everyone would be using free software with open file formats and there’d be no issues with compatibility, but that isn’t the world we live in.
In the world of charities and government agencies that I deal with, every single organisation is using MS Office. Go to their websites and you’ll find marketing materials in PDF, but everything intended to be editable is an MS Word document. MS Office formats are such a standard that they generally aren’t even specified, it’s just assumed that they’re what you’ll send.
Most of those people aren’t even going to have heard of Open/LibreOffice. What response do you think I’d get if I insisted that they install another office suite just so that they can deal with the documents I’m sending to them?
Depends on who the customer is.
If I send request-for-tender files out to multiple recipients, files which my own IT infrastructure can deal with easily, and some recipients respond by saying “we are so incompetent we were unable to open those files” and other comapnies respond to my request for tender, guess which companies I am going to deal with?
BTW between 10% and 20% of businesses, worldwide, depending on their location, have OpenOffice installed.
“Free software is completely able to generate and faithfully re-open the files, in many alternative formats,…”
Is there a name for this private fantasy world of yours?
People every day struggle to open even the most basic .doc files. For any business, this is completely unacceptable. Say what you want or believe what you want, but as long as 100% .doc conversion isn’t made the #1 priority by these project, nobody will use these open source office suites for serious work. I’m sorry, but that’s just the way it is.
I didn’t say that MS Office can necessarily open them. MS Office spits the dummy on trying to open all kinds of files, even its own native format. Utter word salad sometimes is the result, from opening files which open just fine in other programs.
I repeat … if your business expects to do any kind of interoperability at all, then installation of an alternative like LibreOffice (alongside MS Office if you want) is an absolute necessity.
If your business has MS Office only, there are all kinds of files you are going to have trouble with. As you yourself note, “People every day struggle to open even the most basic .doc files. For any business, this is completely unacceptable”. What you fail to note is that the people who have the trouble have MS Office only installed, and it is MS Office which mangles the files on opening.
Completely unacceptable.
Put it this way: if there are a number of documents from different sources being exchanged around the place, if any group of people are going to have trouble opening any of the documents, it will be those people who have only MS Office installed.
By far and away the best solution, if your office expects to do any kind of inetroperability with files from elsewhere, is for your office to install (at zero cost) LibreOffice alongside MS Office. Your business also needs to install a capable PDF viewer, there are a number of free choices in this area as well.
Installing MS Office and nothing else is absolute insanity, considering that alternative office suites are available free of charge with software freedom licenses.
This way, no matter what people send you, your business can cope with it. This will give your business a competitive edge (at no cost) compared to other businessess who try to stuggle to interoperate with the abysmal capabilities of MS Office alone.
Sheesh! Isn’t that bleeding obvious? How thick can some people get?
Edited 2011-06-26 23:39 UTC
This isn’t my experience at all, or the experience of anyone else I know. MS Office may stink when it comes to compatibility with other software, but it’s pretty reliable when dealing with its own file formats. It certainly does a much better job than any alternative software.
Not when every office document received is created with MS Office. When that’s the case alternatives like Open/LibreOffice are completely unnecessary.
I’d install LibreOffice in a second if I ever needed it, but the reality is that out of many thousands of documents I’ve dealt with (from dozens of different organisations), exactly 0 of them were saved in a different office suite’s format.
If the government ever changed to an alternative then I think things might be different. That might happen eventually (I remember when they switched from Lotus Smartsuite), but as it stands every 3rd sector/charitable organisation in the country needs to communicate with them using MS Office formats.
In my experience it isn’t much different in the private sector (in the UK at least), with big companies (those with the power to dictate what’s used) almost all using MS Office. You just have to look at the .doc job applications they provide to applicants for evidence of that.
I’m not sure I see the competitive edge in having software installed that’s unneeded and never used. The idea that people are struggling to interoperate due to MS Office is nonsense in my experience.
You MS apologists sure have a lot of trouble between you getting your story straight.
http://www.osnews.com/thread?478716
“People every day struggle to open even the most basic .doc files. For any business, this is completely unacceptable.”
Too right it is unacceptable. Too right that these people who are using MS Office are struggling to interoperate. Every day.
In fact, this whole sub-thread started on the FUD allegations that schools were downgrading papers, submitted in .doc format, which LibreOffice, OpenOffice et al had no trouble re-opening, but the teachers at the school (using MS Office) could not open. Such files were “word salad” when opened in MS Office was the claim.
So which is it, MS apologists? Do people using MS Office have endless trouble opening files sent to them from elsewhere, or don’t they?
Hmmmmmm? Enquiring minds want to know.
Do try to get your story straight.
Edited 2011-06-27 01:51 UTC
There’s no inconsistency here, you’re just misunderstanding.
I’ll clarify: Documents created in MS Office will usually open without a problem in another copy of MS Office. However, documents created in alternative applications like LibreOffice will often fail to open correctly in MS Office.
When everyone else is using MS Office, the only problems with interoperation are faced by the few who use an alternative. They’ll be the ones considered incompetent or downgraded because (in the eyes of the person opening their messed up .doc file) they can’t format a document correctly.
You can argue that this is an MS Office problem and I’ll agree with you about that. But who’s to blame doesn’t change the fact that in the real world of schools, charities, governments and businesses, MS Office is dominant, and being able to deal with their files is a necessity for many people.
If MS Office users are sent files created in other applications then they’ll have problems, that’s true. The reason why it isn’t such an issue is that most other people are also using MS Office. Like I said, out of the thousands of office documents I’ve been sent, I’ve never encountered one created in anything other than MS Office.
Open source idealism is all very well, but it doesn’t deal with the real world issues that are keeping people using MS Office rather than a free alternative. Do you actually have any practical recommendations for how people can deal with the compatibility problems they’ll face if they switch?
OK, so your position is that people using MS Office do in fact have a problem opening some files sent to them from elsewhere. Your claim is that this happens only when the files from elsewhere were generated by OpenOffice or LibreOffice, which is an entirely unsupported claim, but we will assume for the moment that it is so, for the sake of argument.
OK, then, what is the penalty for simply installing LibreOffice alongside MS Office?
There is none. Incoming files that MS Office chokes on can be opened by LibreOffice. This is just as true for MS Office native format files (from foreign systems) as it is for ODF files, Wordperfect files, MS Works files or any of the 115 formats that LibreOffice opens.
Therefore, any body that installs both MS Office and LibreOffice has better capability, at no extra cost, over any body that installs MS Office only.
QED. Thanks for playing.
When it comes to my family’s education, for which I pay school fees, the school is not the customer, I am.
You have been very lucky, I’ve had plenty of costly problems with just have people work on different installation of the same version of MSO.
Back then I wrote my thesis, the group had decided using MS Office 2k3 which were what the academy were using at the time. But we had no end of problems with work from people home computers.
Some members of the group had MS Office 2k3 in Danish and others had it in English, this made auto indexing troublesome because the tag for headline is localized.
If any of us added a new illustration it would almost always be moved when we opened the document at academy.
The last day before handing in the thesis we spend on correcting spelling, language and layout of the document. I can’t remember exactly how much of that time we spend fixing layout problems, but it was a lot. One of the things we had to do was removing all headlines and adding them again, so we were sure that we could generate a full auto index. All images had to be repositioned so we were sure they were in the right place. And so on.
I realize this was many years ago and a very old version of MSO and I don’t really know if it would have been better to have written the thesis in OOo, personality I wish we had taken the time to learn LaTex.
If you install all the security updates for MS Office XP and 2003, then you will no longer be able to open MS Word 2/6/95 documents. You won’t even be able to open them in WordPad. Ran into this issue just last month as we have a teacher with several hundred Word 6.0 documents they’ve been using for years … that they can no longer open on their Windows XP machine using MS Office 2003!!
What’s even worse, though, is that MS Word can’t open MS Works documents without paying MS for a “File compatibility pack”.
And there’s always the “Office X can’t open Office X+1” documents without going through a lot of hoops.
At least with WordPerfect, any version after 7 can open any versions documents, due to the use of SGML for the document format. I’ve even personally tested that WP9 can open documents created and saved in WP14, without any issues. Try that with MS Office, without adding any extra packages.
Give right clicks a chance. The popup menus really have improved a lot in recent releases of OO/LO, now toolbars and menus have become a secondary interface that does this job relatively well, at least in my typical workflow.
Edited 2011-06-23 05:59 UTC
I have found this certainly to be true of LibreOffice. There is now a fair amount of functionality that can be easily accessed via the right-click mennu right there where you need it, no longer necessitating a round trip of the mouse up to the toolbar and back.
Old versions of KOffice relied a fair bit on drag & drop from the toolbars on to the document area. I hope they don’t persist with that in Calligra Office.
Oh, and another thing which I don’t understand : do people absolutely need to be able to edit your resume ? If not, why don’t you use PDF ?
Personally, I hate it when people send me final versions of documents in the doc format. Not only is it almost guaranteed that the formatting will be messed up (even different versions of Office open different versions of doc differently), it also forces me to fire up an office suite and drill through its visually crowded interface when I could be enjoying the simple and fast interface of most PDF readers.
PDF is the right tool in this context, I think.
Edited 2011-06-23 06:26 UTC
People don’t need to edit it, I do. I keep it up do date and export to PDF when I need to send it to someone.
My current version was built off a Word template given to me by a friend in recruiting about 4 years ago now. It looks great in Word but has never formatted correctly in OpenOffice or now Libre Office. That’s why I want better conversion for old documents.
Indeed, this is a valid use case
Although for something as short as a resume, I’d personally just redo the template once in OpenOffice, save it in doc 97, and be relatively happy with it forever. No need to keep broken documents around.
I recently had occasion to update my CV, because of an upcoming internal vacancy. I worked on it at work (admittedly using Office 2003 on Windows XP) and at home using LibreOffice 3.3.2 running under Kubuntu Natty Narwhal.
It was rendered on-screen and printed exactly the same in either program.
<troll> real men use latex for true formatting simplicity</troll>
trolling aside, latex is quite good for documents that you don’t have to share in an editable state.
I agree with you in theory, however Job Agencies seem to need to edit it as everytime I sent them a PDF of my CV, I was asked to convert it as they couldn’t edit it.
I’m not really sure the reasoning for this – I can only assume it’s to do with how they store the data at their end. However it felt completely backwards to have TXT and RTF preferred over PDF.
Every recruiting firm I’ve dealt with use some kind of indexing software that allows keyword searches, but isn’t compatible with PDF. I wonder if it’s the same program. So I’ve always kept two resumes — a multiple page, .doc formatted resume with loads of keywords based on a template a recruiter gave me for search engines, and then a clean single-page PDF for in-person interviews.
They will often alter your CV depending on the requirements of their client… Often if they don’t have any suitable people on the books, they will modify someone’s cv to make it look like it might match, thus you get the interview but flunk it badly.
Personally i wouldn’t want a modified version of my CV being sent to anyone, it would just make me look bad… And head hunters can be extremely unscrupulous.
I have not looked recently but my personal experience has certainly been that a lot of HR departments require resumes in Microsoft Word format (or even plain text).
A big part of this is just the non-technical and somewhat retarded culture of HR.
Another factor though is that these documents need to play well with whatever systems the companies are using internally. I suspect that many HR departments are applying some level or processing or parsing (scanning for keywords) to these resumes before people even look at them. The tools they are using may not be able to handle PDF as easily as Word files.
What’s non-technical or retarded? The fact that many HR departments know that MS Office is the most used office suite, the best way to exchange documents, and, to some extent, the best office suite from both a technical point of view and usability?
It would be retarded to require documents in other formats.
Are you a Microsoft shill? This reads like marketing and is patently false. MS Word format isn’t the “Nest way to exchange documents” – it’s been PDF or Postscript for many years, if you want it to look the same everywhere and want to be sure everyone can read it.
It would be idiotic to *require* a particular format, which they do. Better to require “A format we can read,” that’s all. This “Word .doc only” thing started back when many different office suites were popular and HR people were tired of receiving documents they could not even open. The rule probably isn’t strictly enforced if you give them a resume in a format they can deal with. I don’t know of any places offhand that actually refuse to open resumes that aren’t .doc or .docx.
That’s certainly why I keep on using MS Office. More significantly it’s why just about every single organisation and charity I encounter in the real world uses MS Office, even when a free alternative would be perfectly usable and save them some money.
I can get used to a different interface (even if it’s a bit of a mess) and I don’t really need any extra features offered by commercial software. But I do need to be able to open MS Office documents received from other people, and send them back documents that they can open. Messed up formatting is unprofessional and unacceptable; documents need to look as they were intended to look.
The only software capable of doing that with reasonable reliability is MS Office itself. That gives it a huge advantage that I can’t see disappearing any time soon.
That’s the most important point when someone chooses an office suite: being able to use that suite to open documents sent by someone else and keep the same formatting and sending to someone else a document which that person can open and keep the same format.
Any other office suite beside MS Office -either free, open source or commercial – do a very, very poor job when opening doc, docx, xls and ppt. Which is totally unacceptable for anyone but open source zealots.
To add to the shame, MS Office runs faster on Linux under Wine than native Open Office or Libre Office. Ironically, the best office suite for Linux, is MS Office running under Wine or Vmware.
FUD. Bullshit. Absolute misinformation.
My experience re MS Word under Wine was the same as parent’s.
Yet my experience is that LibreOffice is significantly faster than OpenOffice and a little faster than MS Office under Wine.
http://www.betanews.com/article/LibreOffice-33-Fast-fun-and-functio…
“LibreOffice 3.3: Fast, fun and functional”
http://pclosmag.com/html/Issues/201103/page14.html
“One of the things that can’t be seen in a list, that’s been included in the reports of nearly all the reviewers, and that must be experienced, are the speed enhancements. Without a doubt, LibreOffice 3.3.0 launches much faster than previous versions of OpenOffice. LibreOffice 3.3.0 also feels much more responsive, with perceptible speed enhancements across all the applications in the office suite.”
People needn’t take my word for this, I have backup.
Edited 2011-06-26 03:20 UTC
Funny how you cite two articles as your “backup” none of which even mentions Wine and yet say people needn’t take your word for this. Well, I happily take your word that LibreOffice is faster than MS Office under Wine for you. But it’s a bit ridiculous trying to accuse other people of lying on that ground.
My evidence is one-thousand-fold better than anything you, or anyone else, has provided to support other contentions that have been made.
Actually, come to think about it, my evidence is far more than a thousand times better, it is infinitely better. After all, any evidence, divided by zero evidence, yields a ratio of of infinity, in favour of my claims, for evidence provided.
Edited 2011-06-26 10:26 UTC
Uhm… OK then.
Fancy math, but what they provided was anecdotal… wait for it.. evidence. And it was actually on topic. You countered with anecdotal evidence from yourself and some others, but as has already been pointed out, the “external” evidence wasn’t even about the same thing.
Anectdotal evidence, even if it is on topic, is what is known as “heresay” evidence. Completely unreliable.
There are countless references available online which would turn up after even the most superficial search which will tell you that LibrOffice forked from OpenOffice late last year, and that ever since then LibreOffice has a much larger group of programmers than OpenOffice has ever had, and they have been diligently going through the OpenOffice code and removing all of the legacy cruft from it.
LibreOffice has now produced a couple of new versions which beat the socks off OpenOffice for speed.
On Linux systems, the old OpenOffice was slower than MS Office under Wine, but only marginally so.
All of this is not even contentious, it is easily discoverable fact. Have a look for yourself.
Yet the posters to whom I responded were trying to pretend that MS Office under Wine was significantly faster than both OpenOffice and LibreOffice, which they lumped in the same box.
Utter rubbish, easily debunked. Try again, sport.
Ugh, your evidence was anecdotal as well. It was based on various personal experiences. The difference was, only your personal experience was about the same issue being discussed, the other things you offered were anecdotal and about a different but related topic.
You wanted us to draw the conclusion that in terms of speed OO < Office, but now OO < LO, that also OO < Office < LO. Clearly that could be or it could be OO < LO < Office. You’re biased towards the first so you select that and call us all idiots because we didn’t.
I think you just have a low burden of proof for things that fit your internal narrative, and a much higher one for things that disrupt your world-view.
There is incontrovertible, objective evidence for that. It is not contentious.
I did not talk about Office, I talked about Office under Wine (Note: Wine software itself takes some time to load when you start a Windows binary under Linux).
I have tried this out myself, but I cannot find a reference where anyone else has tried LibreOffice and MS Office on the same hardware and published their benchmark results in mainstream media. In other words, I have no objective evidence, either way, nor did I pretend to have it.
Given the corporate interests involved here, and the control that big business interests have over what is written about in mainstream media (compared to the lack of control that FOSS interests have), I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to ponder why this is so.
You’re biased because you mis-represent what other people have said. Goodness knows why you are so keen to apparently “lie for Microsoft”, but there it is. You can either tell us why, or not, it is up to you.
Edited 2011-06-27 04:46 UTC
So you admit your anecdotal evidence wasn’t any better than the other posters?
Anectdotal evidence is merely anecdotal evidence whoever posts it. This is so obvious it goes without saying.
The actual point is, my objective, independent evidence is clearly infinitely better than the complete lack of objective evidence posted to the contrary.
So you admit this point?
Furthermore, there is no debating the fact that to run Windows software under Linux requires that the Wine translation layer of software is loaded first, and that this alone affectes the loading time of any Windows software under Linux. Hardly a contentious point there.
At its latest issue, OpenOffice had nearly caught up with MS Office in terms of speed. OpenOffice wasn’t (and still isn’t) as fast as MS Office, but the gap was definitely closing.
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Performance
Is it really so unbelieveable that LibreOffice would be faster than MS Office under Wine on the same Linux system?
http://www.techworld.com.au/article/374381/libreoffice_3_3_released…
“LibreOffice 3.3 has undergone a ‘major clean-up’ of its legacy code base and the Windows installer has been reduced from 75 to 11GB.”
http://keralore.com/blogs/1651/libreoffice-3-4-with-more-features/
“Code optimization has been a particular focus in the development work on this first LibreOffice package, for example, and developers have been working hard to improve the quality and stability of the legacy code inherited from OpenOffice.org.”
It shouldn’t be, because (anecdotally) it is.
Edited 2011-06-27 05:51 UTC
My point is that you berate other posters, claiming that your arguments 1000 times (wait, no, infinitely!) better than theirs (Mathematical quibble: a constant divided by 0 is not infinity, it’s undefined).
And no, it’s not unbelievable at all if LibreOffice is faster than MS Office on Linux. I would even expect that to be the case, but I haven’t seen any evidence to confirm it.
When other posters contradict themselves and each other from one post to the next, and try to insist against all logic that somehow installing zero cost freedom software (which gives extra capability) is a poor recommendation compared to not installing it, then sorry, but I am going to call them on it.
Deal with it.
Maybe you’ve been reading a different thread, but I think what was said was “Don’t use LibreOffice to share doc/docx files”. As far as I see (maybe I missed something) no one has recommended against installing LO on your machine?
This was the utterly ridiculous post against FOSS software:
http://www.osnews.com/thread?478637
In actual fact, the files in question open fine everywhere BUT MS Office. It is only opening them in MS Office that does any mangling.
Maybe you have a shortcoming of comprehension or something, but the actual fact of the matter is that sharing files is one area where LibreOffice absolutely spanks MS Office.
Edited 2011-06-27 11:05 UTC
I should perhaps have stated this in a more direct fashion, so here goes:
Relying exclusively on MS Office to share (or archive) files is absolutely foolhardy. Insanity of the highest order.
Edited 2011-06-27 11:20 UTC
No, I think my comprehension is OK, although I read the main point of that post as: if you’re in a situation in which you must produce a .docx file (a couple situations are listed) then don’t use LO/OO. To me it is clear that the author doesn’t mind LO/OO, but finds that in many solutions one absolutely requires Office.
I believe most others here have addressed the technical “Can LO/OO produce .docx files” not, “Should I be forced to produce .docx files”. It’s quite bad to mix these two in the same conversation, one problem being technical, the other social.
Nowhere in that post is there a recommendation against installing FOSS software in general.
All that was stated (and this is 100% accurate) is that relying on FOSS office suites to be compatible with MS Office is a very bad idea. If you need to collaborate with MS Office users then you need to use MS Office yourself.
Even you don’t dispute that documents created in software like Open/LibreOffice will often open incorrectly in MS Office.
Actually, I’ve seen MS Office files open with formatting glitches in OpenOffice, but obviously the main concern when sharing documents with other people is whether they can open the files you send to them.
Not when other people are using MS Office. When that’s the case using LibreOffice to create files for sharing can be a disaster. I don’t get why this is so hard for you to understand.
Surely you can see that this is a big problem for LibreOffice users when we live in a world where the vast majority use MS Office?
There is absolutely no problem with installing and using LO. The only time anyone will get into any difficulty with document sharing is if they have MS Office ONLY installed. If you rely on MS Office only, you will have problems with interoperability. Period.
I don’t get why this is so hard for you to understand.
Who the hell are you arguing with, the voices in your head?
Dave_K even explicitly stated he WOULD install LO if he needed to.
A good many people have ONLY MS Office installed, despite the fact that other solutions are freedom software and cost free. It is ONLY these people who will have any problems with document interoperability.
Everyone else, those who have even the slightest modicum of sense and install another freedom office suite as well as MS Office, will have no such problems (no matter what anyone else does in sending files to them).
Ergo, the only big problem lies with people who try to use MS Office exclusively.
Utter nonsense. Every organisation I’ve worked for and dealt with uses MS Office exclusively. As far as I know none of them have an alternative office suite installed. None of them have problems with interoperability, if only because they’re all dealing with other MS Office users.
While MS Office remains dominant, the only people who have a big problem with interoperability are those who don’t have MS Office.
Having access to alternatives isn’t a bad thing, on the off chance that support for other formats is ever needed. But the rest of the time people are dealing with MS Office documents, and MS Office is absolutely essential for that.
Doing without alternative software like Open/LibreOffice is easy, trying to get by without MS Office would be nearly impossible.
Installing another office suite wouldn’t do much harm (apart from some added complexity for users, who’d need to know which documents to open in which software), but why would I bother when I never encounter any documents which require an alternative?
Even if was worth installing an alternative alongside MS Office, that doesn’t change the fact that people still need to purchase a copy of MS Office. It effectively makes that alternative office suite a rather large and rarely used compatibility utility, rather than being a full MS Office replacement that can save organisations some money.
IME Softmaker Office 2010 has flawless MS Office compatibility. It’s not free, but cheap.
I check out kword and now Calligra Words from time to time, and it’s been a long time since I thought it was ‘promising’. The interface doesn’t seem to be developed much at all, being overly simplistic while in its default layout wasting more space than any other app and showing less functionality than Abiword (I think it’s meant to be more advanced).
The worst thing, though, is the font rendering. It doesn’t seem to use the system font rendering, which works fine, but rather uses something completely different, with poor forms and those annoying rainbow patterns you could get back in the old days when LCD screens were as new as anti-aliasing. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to work in this.
There has been no formal release, yet, of Calligra Words. There is therefore no basis of comparison, your issues were with KWord.
Incidentally, it was the KWord developer who caused the fork which resulted in Calligra Office.
Calligra Words, in conjunction with “flakes” from other Calligra Suite applications, is far more sophisticated than Abiword.
http://wiki.koffice.org/index.php?title=Flake
http://wiki.koffice.org/index.php?title=Libs/Flake/Accessibility
http://wiki.koffice.org/index.php?title=Libs/Flake/Connectors
http://wiki.koffice.org/index.php?title=Libs/Flake/Tools_And_Pointe…
In fact, Calligra Words is closer to DTP than word-processing.
http://wiki.koffice.org/index.php?title=KWord
http://wiki.koffice.org/index.php?title=KWord/Master_Documents
http://wiki.koffice.org/index.php?title=KWord/Scripting
http://wiki.koffice.org/index.php?title=Libs/KoText/Text_Plugins
http://wiki.koffice.org/index.php?title=Libs/KoText/Change_tracking
Waaaaaay more sophisticated than Abiword.
The Calligra Words GUI is indeed being worked on, and in fact bringing polish to the GUI is the main focus of these preview snapshots.
Font rendering in Calligra Words is done by Qt. Qt is KDE infrastructure, it has nothing to do with Calligra Words itself. The issue with Qt font rendering exposed by Calligra Words is fixed in Qt 4.8.
Qt 4.8 is in Technology Preview release status right now.
http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/05/24/technology-preview-of-qt-4-8-no…
Formal release won’t be far away, it will certainly occur well before October when the first release of Calligra Words is due out.
Your points are all addressed.
Edited 2011-06-23 09:53 UTC
Thanks, great reply.
I actually have Calligra Words as packaged for the Archlinux kde-snapshots repository installed (KDE 4.7 beta). I’ll take another look when Qt 4.8 is out.
You are more than welcome.
Even in this second preview snapshot I don’t believe that the issue with the GUI has been addressed yet. They are still working on it. Some patience is still required.
It should only get better from this point onwards. Right now, apparently, the Calligra suite has more developers working on it than it has ever had in the past.
whats your problem with abiword? In many cases I do not need msoffice functionality and work with abiword on windows. It is a good product. It misses collaboration functionality but I use it as a word processor. I am interested on trying calligra on mswindows (or much better reactos as long as the issues with kde on windows are resolved, I never understood why they support vc++, mingw (x)or mingw64 are enough). Yes I am an open source junky but I think I have a (practical) point here.
I have absolutely no problem with Abiword, it is indeed a good product. It does what it does very well. It is a far better option for people, IMO, than other products of approximately the same capability … such as Wordpad. Everyone would without a doubt be far better off using Abiword rather than Wordpad.
This was the original poster’s comment: “The interface doesn’t seem to be developed much at all, being overly simplistic while in its default layout wasting more space than any other app and showing less functionality than Abiword (I think it’s meant to be more advanced).”
Calligra Words certainly is more advanced than Abiword. While it is true to say that the existing KWord UI is not very discoverable and that it wastes space, my comment in reply was to point out that Calligra Words is considerably more sophisticated (more capable) than Abiword. In conjunction with the rest of the Calligra suite, it does a lot more. You are not really comparing Apples with Apples. It is like comparing Wordpad to Word … they aren’t even in the same ballpark.
This doesn’t mean that Abiword is no good, Abiword is absolutely fine for what it does. It just means that Calligra Words and Abiword don’t really compete with one another.
Its not using something completely different, it’s a bug in Qt making it look terrible. You have to turn off hinting and anti aliasing so it can look “normal”. The bug probably will never be fixed as both Calligra and Nokia are throwing the ball at each other since years.
This issue should be fixed by the release of Qt 4.8.
http://www.calligra-suite.org/news/calligra-suite-the-first-three-m…
(BTW: The text layout issues were probably the very thing that created the Calligra fork).
See also:
http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/03/14/hint-hint-nudge-nudge-say-no-mo…
Edited 2011-06-24 00:35 UTC
This really needs a Windows release. The benefits would be significant – real competition on the Windows desktop.
Also a web accessible online “cloud” webapp would be great too .. and because of the modular nature and “engine” this should be do-able.
This topic is discussed here:
http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=203&t=94347&sid=f6796255b7a13e…
The answer seems to be that Calligra has dependencies on Qt and on kdelibs but not on the KDE Plasma desktop itself. Porting to other platforms is therefore possible, but it would involve quite a bit more work than porting an application that depended only on Qt. Significant parts of kdelibs would have to be re-implemented for the other platform.
Apparently there is only a very small team (perhaps one or two people) working on it. Don’t expect it to happen real soon.
Edited 2011-06-24 03:31 UTC
afaik Calligra compiles fine with msvc 2010 and mingw. So does Qt and kdelibs.
Interesting rumour: the N9 office suite is based on Calligra’s core engine
This is the message in the download site:
Will probably come once in release-mode.
http://www.calligra-suite.org/news/its-summer-already/
April 21: “Yesterday, the selected projects for Google Summer of Code were announced. KDE has 51 slots this year. Out of those 51 slots, 8 are for Calligra. We^aEURTMre very happy to welcome so many students to our project!”
There were a number of ideas that did not get selected for GSoC, but at least these 8 did. With luck some of this work may find its way into the first release in October.
But called the Calligra Suite — and not for nothing. There’s much more than just office applications in the suite. And at least Krita is already used by professional artists for their work :-). Plan is pretty unique in the free software world, as is Kexi, actually. Lots of good stuff in Calligra, making it well worth checking out.
As for the whole train wreck of a “if it’s not by MS, it’s not good enough” discussion… We know we’ve got a way to go, we don’t support export to either the binary or the ooxml Microsoft Office file formats yet. So for these documents, it’s viewing or conversion to OpenDocument. Personally, I never have had any trouble with OpenOffice to share .doc documents with editors or sending in my CV as .doc created with OpenOffice — but maybe my CV (though very impressive content-wise, of course) isn’t in a complicated enough format.