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List:       koffice
Subject:    Re: KDE Myth Site - interoperability - myth and truth
From:       Nicolas Goutte <nicog () snafu ! de>
Date:       2002-07-11 20:53:13
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On Donnerstag, 11. Juli 2002 15:58, Ferdinand Gassauer wrote:

(...)

> - ms word and excel documents are opened, but not all information is
> handled correct. see http://www.koffice.org/filters/status.phtml. BTW I do
> not know who classifies the MS filters as "good". Most of the documents I
> usualy have to open are not handled completly correct.
> - export filters for word and excel are mssing.

Old KOffice rule: no volunteer, no code.

Therefore as long as nobody is here to work on these filters, there will be 
not any improvement.

And it has nothing to do with the current developers. You need manpower in one 
form or another: be it by having many people or be it by people having much 
time. KOffice has none of both forms of manpower. KOffice has only few 
developers that mostly have only limited time for KOffice. And we simply 
cannot be everywhere.

>
> In practice this means, that KDE does not yet allow the user to fully or
> sufficiently  participate in business live, without having other browsers
> and office suites installed (which BTW are far from perfect too).

Please do not forget that applications like Netscape and StarOffice are (much) 
older than KDE! So even Mozilla and OpenOffice have an older code base than 
KDE and especially than KOffice.

>
> Just let me state that I am in the postion to decide to switch to KDE/Linux
> on the desktop side, (as I decided this on the server side already), but at
> the time being MS-Office is not replacable by any other free suite
> (KOFFICE, GNUMERIC, ABIWORD, Open-Office) I use regulary. Same for Outlook
> with it's various sync options to Palmtops and mobile phones.
>

> Let me think loud - to gain interoperability with MS-Office (see also
> http://xml.openoffice.org/xml_advocacy.html) it migth make sense to supply
> XML-Import filters versions of word and excel (see
> http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnnews/2001/may/Excel/Excel.asp). Even if this
> is not exactly what KDE wants, it would allow (me) to create kspreads at
> home and open them with excel in the office.

It brings not much.

We have RTF from/to KWord filters and nearly nobody uses them. (Especially the 
export filter: it was broken however nobody filed a bug report.) The user 
wants to open and save into native file formats, not in the exchange file 
formats. We had already at least one thread about this on the koffice mailing 
list.

As one developer of OpenOffice wrote once, it would be much easier for the 
developers if the users would want to use the exchange formats.

>
> And yes I have reported many bugs and hopefuly contributed a bit to the KDE
> project, so hopefuly this are just some more 2c.

Thanks for your bug reports. However, as nobody is working currently on the MS 
Word import filter, your bug reports are only stored for now. :-(

No volunteer, no code!

Have a nice day/evening/night!
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