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  From: Dan Shearer <dan@tellurian.com.au>
  To  : andrew <galdes1@iprimus.com.au>
  Date: Mon, 18 Dec 2000 08:20:27 +1030 (CST)

Re: KDE 2 koffice

On Sat, 16 Dec 2000, andrew wrote:

> G'day all,
> has anyone noticed that kwords undo doesn't work.. hehehe, is it just me or 
> has soemone else seen this? It seems a little buggy to me.

This bug appears to exist in my KWord 1.0 under KDE 2.01 as well.

I have been trying out all the KOffice components as part of some research
into the latest state of office suites. People (ie, users) think that they
need a comprehensive and consistent office productivity suite so free
software needs to provide a good one. (I find little need for such a
thing.)

My conclusions are that in open source office suites you can get one of
the following two attributes but not both:

    * usable, stable and with a good portion of the facilities provided
      by all the big Windows suites

    * well-designed, lightweight component architecture with good
      prospects for development in a free software model of some sort
      or another

Applications in the latter category (including KWord and some of the other
KOffice components, and maybe [1] some of the Gnome office components)
seem to be maturing rapidly but they really aren't usable to people who
have some previous knowledge of a commercial Windows suite.

--
Dan Shearer
Open Source Manager
dan@tellurian.com.au

[1] Can anyone explain how Gnumeric+Abiword etc fits into OpenOffice,
which is sort-of what the Gnome Foundation say they are aiming for?
OpenOffice (ex-StarOffice) is usable but with a monster code base, Gnome
Office is promising but not very functional comparitively, and I can't see
how the two can be fused in any timeframe that matters (ie, years.)


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