ran into some problems while installing koffice from sources on debian, so here is my case:

main software:
Debian Woody, KDE 3.0.1 from unofficial debs, koffice-1.2-beta source from koffice.org

1. first I ran "./configure --prefix=/usr"
To get configure to finish, the following packages needed to be installed:
xlibs-dev libxml2 libxslt libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev libjpeg62-dev libqt3-dev 
libqt3-mt-dev libqt3-mt kdebase-dev kdelibs4-dev kbugbuster
(some might be extra, but they don't hurt)

2. then I ran "make all"
..which stopped a few times due to missing files, so I needed to install:
libarts-dev libarts1-dev libarts1 libarts1-qt imagemagick libqt3-mt-dev libqt3-dev libpng-dev libasound2-dev
(again, some might be extra)

(3. to check everything I ran "make check", but that resulted in errors..)

4. then I ran "make install" and everything installed

(5. to check I also ran "kbuildsycoca")