Raphael
Langerhorst
raphael.langerhorst@kdemail.net

# &kde; Office

## Introduction to KOffice

### Overview

The &kde; project has also created a fully featured office suite called &koffice; which adheres to standards and fits very well into the &kde; desktop. This section was written with version 1.4 of &koffice; in mind.

&koffice; is a highly integrated office suite that builds directly on the KDE technology. This has many advantages in terms of integration, features, performance, familiar look and feel and so on. All technologies like &DCOP;, KIO, KParts are directly available.

In particular the KParts technology is extended for the &koffice; components to allow very flexible embedding of documents inside documents.

Because much technology is already present inside &kde; itself, &koffice; is a very lightweight office suite, which results in fast application startup and low memory consumption. This makes &koffice; a very suitable office suite for older hardware as well, which can save lots of costs in some cases.

&koffice; is also a very feature complete office suite. It is not limited to word processing, spreadsheets or presentations, but has also components for image manipulation, flow charts, business report generation, database management and project management. Because of the flexible component integration smaller utilities like the diagram and chart engine as well as the formula editor are available as stand alone tools.

As you can see &koffice; brings a lot of features that can enrich your office experience. Its straight forward and &kde; like approach in look and feel as well as familiar usability makes &koffice; quite useful for daily office work.

### Features

This list gives a general outline of the &koffice; features. The &koffice; office suite is too large to list every detail.

#### &koffice; features:

- Fully builds on &kde; which makes these technologies available at low costs.

- Fully integrates into &kde; which is vital for business environments.

- &kde; technologies include document location abstraction, DCOP scripting, parts and plugins,...

- Full Component embedding.

- Low memory footprint, fast startup, lightweight.

- Feature complete: many components are offered.

- Intuitive, good looking and easy to learn user interface.

- Adheres to standards: OASIS OpenDocument file format.

### OASIS OpenDocument file format

It is important for an office suite to use standards where possible, especially for the file format. The OASIS OpenDocument file format specification is an open standard for office applications. This format is spreading more and more, it is also the same file format OpenOffice.org uses, which means that file exchange with any user of this office suite is easily possible.

Adhering to official standards is always a good thing. For business environments it is even vital to exactly know about their documents.

&koffice; has more components to offer than what is covered by the OASIS specification. Still, all components covered by the specifications actually use the OASIS OpenDocument file format.

## &koffice; Components Overview

### Available &koffice; Components

Keep in mind that all these components can integrate very well into each other. So basically a spreadsheet can contain anything from charts to presentations, reports and even text documents. Likewise almost any component can contain almost any other.

#### Text Processing and Desktop Publishing - &kword;

&kword; is mainly a textprocessing component, but it includes many aspects of a desktop publishing application. This creates a rather unique mixture of features that makes interesting layouts easily possible.

#### Spreadsheets - &kspread;

&kspread; is a pretty standard spreadsheet application. It offers many functions as well as formatting, multiple sheets, charts, diagrams and more. Of course it can easily integrate any other koffice component to extend its abilities.

#### Presentations - &kpresenter;

&kpresenter; is a presentation component. It can be used to create on-screen presentations or to design and print transparencies.

#### Flow Charts and more - &kivio;

&kivio; can be used for any kind of flow charts or diagrams. Additional stencil sets can be used for custom needs. Even UML diagrams are possible.

#### Vector Graphics - &karbon14;

&karbon14; is a vector drawing application.

#### Pixmap Graphics - &krita;

&krita; is a tool for creating high quality pixmap graphics. It offers many plugins for image manipulations and supports various formats.

#### Business Reports - &kugar;

&kugar; can be used to create business quality reports. A designer helps to easily design such reports.

#### Database Management and Forms - &kexi;

&kexi; is a full blown database management application. You can design forms for working with data. Many backends, like PostgreSQL or MySQL are possible. It is even capable of importing MS Access mdb database files.

## Further Information

### Application Manuals

Each Koffice component comes with its own manual. These manuals offer all the latest information about the various components &koffice; has to offer and should be read to learn more about &koffice;. The website is also a good place to find out more.

### Internet Resources

The primary site on the internet is http://www.koffice.org

You will also find information about the user and developer mailing lists as well as additional developer resources.

The Kexi project has even an additional website, which can be found at http://www.kexi-project.org

### Plugin development

&koffice; can easily be extended with plugins. Plugin development is not very difficult and can be used to optimize your everyday workflow. Such capabilities are probably very interesting in business environments to make &koffice; meet individual requirements. You can either take a look at existing plugins or read a general introduction at the developer's site. The general KDE developers website is available at http://developer.kde.org.