KOffice falls short of Microsoft Office standard

One of the major complaints regarding Linux as a feasible alternative to the Microsoft Windows environment on desktops has been the lack of usable, Linux-based business productivity software. In corporations, an integrated office suite offering word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software is a basic requirement. The Linux-based KOffice suite attempts to fill that void, but still has a lot of ground to cover before it can catch up with the de facto corporate standard, Microsoft Office.

KOffice is an integrated office suite designed to run on the K Desktop Environment under X Window System. Based on a collaborative effort of volunteers in the Linux community, Version 1.1 of KOffice, released in August, represents a significant improvement over the 1.0 release by incorporating four principle applications and four support programs and fixing numerous bugs.

KOffice's main applications are KWord, a word-processing and desktop-publishing application; KSpread, a table-oriented spreadsheet application; KPresenter, a presentation application; and Kivio, a flow-charting application. The support applications--Kontour, a vector graphics drawing program; KChart, a chart-drawing program; KFormula, a formula editor; and Krayon, a pixel-based image-manipulation program--allow users to edit objects that can be inserted into other KOffice applications.

We obtained our test copy of KOffice 1.1 directly from the KDE FTP site (ftp.kde.org). A boxed version was not available at the time of testing, but several vendors that offer KDE binary CDs include KOffice with their distribution. The FTP site contains both the original source code (for those who want to compile their own copy) as well as pre-packaged binary images supplied by major Linux distribution vendors. We downloaded the binaries--slightly over 11MB--for our Red Hat 7.1 system. Installation was a snap--a simple RPM command installed the packages on our system.

As Microsoft Office is the standard for office productivity software, we compared the feature sets of KOffice components to their Microsoft counterparts. We also examined the file portability between the two suites, and it was in this area that KOffice proved somewhat disappointing. The KOffice components had difficulty correctly importing and exporting Microsoft Office documents. When using KWord, we found that we were able to open a Microsoft Word document, but were not able to export a KWord document into Microsoft Word format. (This is a documented limitation.) Opening a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet in KSpread correctly translated our formulas, yet numerical data did not convert correctly. KPresenter did not convert our PowerPoint presentations correctly at all, with text, objects, and background data not appearing.

KWord is more akin to a desktop-publishing program than a traditional word-processing program. Each document consists of one or more "frames," each of which can contain text or graphics. Frames can be repositioned on the page, allowing for text to flow around graphics. Graphics frames can contain pictures or objects from other KOffice components, such as a KSpread spreadsheet object or a KChart data chart. During our testing, we found the user interface extremely easy to use and were able to create complicated documents with multiple text and graphics frames. Templates, paragraph styles, rulers, and headers and footers all rounded out the document-creation process. Users of Microsoft Word's basic word-processing features will be able to use KWord easily, but advanced users will experience a slight learning curve with some features (such as columns, which are implemented as dual frames within KWord).

KOffice's spreadsheet component, KSpread, does not vary a great deal from competitive products, and in form and function, is on a par with older versions of VisiCalc. KSpread uses a table-like interface where each cell can contain text, numbers, or a computational formula. Cells may be formatted in a variety of ways, and the selection of built-in functions is adequate for most users, although not as exhaustive as competitive products.

Unfortunately, performance of this component proved troublesome. Trying to get the software to compute a basic SUM() function on a range of cells yielded an error. We later found out that, unlike in Excel, function names in KSpread are case-sensitive, so typing "=SUM(A1:A15)" in a cell yields an error while typing "=sum(a1:a15)" does not. This is a major shortcoming for anyone who has ever used another spreadsheet, including Lotus 1-2-3 and Quattro.

KPresenter is fairly basic and contains most of the features a business user would need to create a presentation slide show. The program allows users to create multiple slides. A collection of graphics, text objects, and other geometric objects (circles, ellipses, rectangles) can be placed within each slide, and transitional effects can be added between slides. The characteristics of each object (size, color, alignment) can be modified, and some objects can be shadowed and rotated. The software does not provide for speaker's notes.

The most exciting feature we found in KPresenter was the option to create an HTML slide show from the collection of slides. Using this feature, we were able to publish our test document to a series of HTML files for uploading to a Web site.

For flow-charting, Kivio is a handy program, though its usability is somewhat limited. Each flow chart object within Kivio is scriptable (via the Python scripting language). The basic KDE product includes a programming flow-chart stencil set; additional stencil sets can be purchased. Furthermore, a stencil builder application aids in the creation of custom stencils. We were able to layer stencils, and group several of them together to make manipulation easier. Unfortunately, in our testing we found Kivio cannot import stencil sets created for Microsoft's Visio, nor can Kivio import or export documents to Visio. These limitations are documented in the program's FAQ.

KOffice 1.1 contains many of the major functional components contained in Microsoft Office, with a few "polished finish" exceptions. For example, within the newer releases of Office, Word documents are checked for spelling and grammar during composition, with colored underlining showing potential mistakes. KWord offers only a spell-check feature--and only as a user-invoked option. KWord does not check for grammar and does not have a built-in thesaurus. Whereas these limitations don't diminish KWord's usability as an alternative to Word, they do position the product somewhere between Window's basic WordPad word processor and Word itself.

Compared with their counterparts in Sun Microsystems' StarOffice, another popular office suite available for Linux, the feature sets of KOffice's applications fall short. For example, StarOffice's applications support VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) macros, whereas KOffice 1.1's applications do not. KOffice does not include a database application, while StarOffice has Adabas. Additionally, StarOffice is far more compatible with Microsoft Office.

KOffice does offer some benefits over StarOffice. For instance, because KOffice is a series of independent applications that a user loads individually as needed, KOffice responds much faster on startup and is less memory-intensive than StarOffice.

The numerous individuals who comprise the collaborative effort resulting in KOffice 1.1 have done an impressive job building a highly functional, simple desktop office productivity suite for Linux. It is important to note, though, that because KOffice is the result of a volunteer effort, many features found in other office productivity suites are either not functional or are missing entirely from KOffice. For that reason, while KOffice 1.1 represents a significant step in the right direction for the future of Linux, its usability in corporate or other environments with serious information-processing needs is, at best, problematic. Users in those environments would be better served by staying with StarOffice at this time.

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Software requirements and specs: KOffice

• Platform: Linux
• Processor: Intel or Alpha
• RAM: 64MB (required by the KDE environment under X)
• Disk space: 13MB
• CD-ROM required: No
• Downloadable full version: Yes

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Running KOffice right now? Got your own opinion? Talk Back below. Michael P. Deignan is a freelance journalist and frequent contributor to CNET Linux Center.