Just my cent, but I suspect that this is not about writing a letter, or even
a scientific paper, but rather about preparing complex (formatting, not
content ;-) documents. OpenOffice, while clumsy, slow and memory hungry, has
some features very often used by corporate people, and which are not (well,
of that what I know) available now, or even planned in near future for KWord
or Abiword. Some examples:

- ability to track changes to documents (collaborative work)
- interactive fields (for preparing forms)
- drawing functions (for inserting scalable graphical elements directly into
document, without embedding or copying)
- scripting language (and macro recorder in 643 build)

For most professional users (i.e. people who use office suite as their main
working tool) above functionality is not just bells and whistles...

Besides, a lot of KOffice features are, well, experimental, despite the fact
that currently distributed release (1.2) is called "stable". For example
zoom support in KSpread :-) (and yes, I know that it is being fixed)

OK - even I begin to feel that I am starting to troll, almost...

But to do something constructive - three of my co workers, quite interested
in using open source office tools, proposed to prepare sort of "feature
analysis" for KOffice. All of them are very heavy Microsoft Office users,
working in a corporate environment and having at the same time some IT
experience (one of them have been using Unix before even Linux was started
:-).

They offered to work for some time with main KOffice components (starting
with KPresenter, and going through KWord and KSpread) and prepare sort of
corporate "wishlist", ranking various features into three categories -
"critical" (meaning - indispensable for their organizations, or work),
"desirable" (just normal wishes) and plain bugs, and explaining why
particular feature would be necessary for their business needs.

Would such analysis be useful to KOffice developers? Please let me know, and
we can start preparing it (or not, if you think that it would be useless).

Piotr Gawrysiak

PS. Of course eventual bugs (if any) would be added latter to Bugzilla. :-)
-------
>Jaymz Julian <jaymz@dspaudio.com> on November 02 2002:

>you know, some day, someone will explain to me why people get so damn wet
>over openoffice - have people lost their ability to tell the difference
>between "good" and "bad"?  Seriously.

>Oh, gee, look, I'm gonna throw 128meg of ram at typing a letter, and still
>be a pig.  How leet am I!

>--
>Jaymz Julian aka A Life in Hell
>Coder, Visionary, Fat Ass.
>"And the moral of this story is never lean on the weird. Or they will
>chop your head off. And perverts will eat your brains." - Hunter S.
>Thompson


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