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List:       koffice
Subject:    Re: [kde] KDE version of OpenOffice?
From:       Philipp =?ISO-8859-1?Q?M=FCller?= <philipp.mueller () gmx ! de>
Date:       2002-11-04 9:33:03
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Hello Piotr,

I again add my comments about my personal view, especially with regard to
KSpread functionality.

We 4 core developers of KSpread have all normal work and we are using EXCEL
extensively (at least myself, as I have a pure business administration job). 
The reason I got involved in KSpread development was simply, that KSpread
was not maintained any longer by the original core developer. So it was in a
bad state and bugs weren’t fixed (some months before 1.2 release). Nearly at
the same time the other joined as well, fixing bugs and enhance basic
functionality.

I point this out, because you may have the wrong impression about the
developers of KOffice. We are not only some geeks who have fun to program some
esoteric functionality, we are also simple office program users, willing to help
bringing an office suite to KDE, which is competitive to all existing
programs and which we want to use ourselves.
But of course, we need time and aren’t a huge programmer team, which can
easily add big functionality. Additional, I don’t care about how long it will
take, otherwise I would have given up already. I’m only sure, we will reach
this goal.

So the thing is, we are not missing focus, we are missing programmers and
supporters (e.g. anybody willing to enhance our homepage?) to bring KOffice to
the corporate desktop _faster_.

> 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)

All of this functionality is well known by me and used daily at work.

> 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)

This was a hit directly into my heart ;-). You don’t know how much hassle I
had with this simple realization. It was enabled, just because I wanted
feedback and it was the clear step in between to full zoom support (as it is
nearly now in cvs).
Open Source is about release often, so you can make smaller steps in
functionality. Here it was that we needed to change the internal coordinate system
from int to double. KSpread 1.2 was here 60% of this work done and I’m still
the opinion that it was good this way.

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

You are not trolling, as you make technical statements and you try to help.

> 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).

As for KSpread I can say, that such a list of missing functionality wouldn’t
help at the moment. Just have a look at our own TODO list in cvs:
http://webcvs.kde.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/koffice/kspread/TODO?rev=1.54&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup
(the names here only says, when nobody else comes up, I will do when I have
time. If someone else wants to do it, feel free to join).

You can easily see, that we have enough todos and see the essential
functionality.
Lot’s of tiny/big stuff is still missing there, but this is what we already
intend to do.
There is no problem adding more stuff here, but this doesn’t help to
implement it faster. And I think your important point is _now_ and not in some
years.

Currently we are still on the way to enhance the core, so new functionality
(like autofilter), which should be easy to implement, has to wait until the
core is better. It doesn’t help to add functionality on top of a core, which
is in need to change.

But, if you like to help here, bug hunting is really a great help.
If I compare the bugs I fixed already in cvs with the bugs I found on our
bug tracking system, then I have the impression there are a lot of other bugs
out in the release, but nobody tested/reported them.

More bug reports with good description is really needed. Such work from your
team will help KOffice the most. Best would be testing the compiled branch
KOFFICE_1_2, so we get bugs fixed until next bugfix release (which should be
in some weeks).

OTOH, I wouldn’t know what to do with a big wishlist, when I still have to
focus my work on bringing the zoom support into bugfree state, which I assume,
will take me at least another 3 months (including the work on rich text and
WYSIWYG).

Bugs are different, bugs must be fixed even in between and helps the current
release (upcoming 1.2.1) and the next.

Just one final word:
My comments regarding KSpread may sound a bit negative, but this is only my
personal impression regarding corporate usage. For home/private purposes,
KSpread (and KOffice in general) is already fine to use. And this is where we
can fully compete at the moment.
In the long run, _nothing_ will stop us from the corporate desktop! 

Philipp

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