[ Thanks to Kevin
Reichard for this link. ]
“KWord would be quite an accomplishment and a thing of which
the developers at KDE could be rightly proud, even if their work
stopped right there. But it doesn’t, by a long shot. The
KOffice suite includes a 3-D chartmaker, a vector-drawing program,
a bitmap-graphics program, an application that prepares
presentations, a formula editor, an image viewer, and, of course, a
spreadsheet. In the works is a database application that will
become part of the suite when it is ready, though it may not be
part of the initial release.”
“KWord as of this writing supports its native format, HTML of
several varieties, and plain text, with rich-text format (RTF) and
Microsoft Word filters in the works. KSpread, the spreadsheet
program, has its own format and reads and writes Excel 97 and
comma-separated value files. KPresenter, the presentation editor,
again has its own native format, but it can work with Power Point
97 files, too.”
“While KOffice isn’t yet the suite onto which you want to hang
your business’s fortunes, a stroll through it makes it plain that
it one day will be. And many of its parts are largely useful today,
so getting early experience with it is a reasonable thing to do.
KDE is as close to a standard Linux desktop as exists; it is highly
likely that KDE2 and KOffice will be part of many if not most Linux
distributions by year’s end. Presuming that KOffice lives up to its
promise, it will transport Linux a giant step toward becoming a
desktop operating system second to none.”