KOffice vs. OpenOffice

[P Kapat]

On Sun, Sep 28, 2008 at 5:52 PM, Willy K. Hamra <w.hamra1987 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've read in Kubuntu's website about the new koffice beta released. Ever
> since i started using linux, i've been using openoffice, and i think
> it's a very nice suite, definitely better than Microsoft Office. but
> what about this koffice? i've never seen it or tried it yet. anything
> special about it? any more functionality? i guess it would behave better
> in KDE since it's designed using qt (if i'm not mistaken), so it would
> look and behave better than gtk apps, but anything fancy about it?

One thing that I was _never_ able to figure was using kchart inside
kspread! Seemingly, (so much for "usability") kchart needs the data in
rows and can not understand columns. Suppose you have a small file
with two columns: Time, Exchange-rate. You want to plot Exchange rate
( Y-axis / vertical axis) as a function of Time (X-axis / horizontal
axis ). If the file is small then you can save it as a txt/csv file
and "transpose" the data ( rows <--> columns) by hand. If the file is
big enough for hand editing, then you can write some shell script
(using awk and sed) to do the transpose function.

Now suppose you (I do) maintain a few spreadsheets of my car expenses:
 fuel related (miles driven, price, price/gal, odometer, date, grade,
shop), insurance related, maintenance related (this is a messy
spreadsheet).. And want to draw some charts, which you can update
regularly without much grinding, on time-series of various expenses,
some pie charts, etc... In such large scale situations, shell scripts
become useless. Too many parameteres to take care of while writing
such a script - too much time investment! So, I use, OO.o Calc. Not
really clean but more than sufficient for my purpose.

And what is the "philosophy" behind requiring data in rows as opposed
to columns?

Regarding KWord: it can not handle images comfortably, at least from
my old experience. Try to include an image file, (png/jpg) in a page,
obviously, unless the image is too small, there is reduction of size
going on on-the-fly. The image that you see "on-screen" is blured and
pathetic, but exporting it to a PDF or printing a hardcopy given
correct images. Especially, for the images that I deal with - plots
and graphs from some data. I am not too interested in a
scenic/vaccation image.

And last I checked, KWords' (1.6.x) handling of MS Word documents is
also pathetic. But as some one already mentioned this is not their
goal. They follow a different philosophy.

Lastly, this issue plagues every spreadsheet application on the planet
except MS Excel 2007 (it existed in XP/2003 version too, but they
fixed it in the "fancier" 2007 version ): Hard restrictions on the
number of rows and columns. I regularly deal with csv files with more
than 100K rows. All spreadsheet apps (OO.o Cacl, KSpread, ....) have a
upper bound of 65536 (= 2^16) rows. There is some low level machine -
optimization reason to it, which I am not entirely aware of.

Of course, these are technical data and a spreadsheet is not the right
application for this. I know, I use R/Matlab for data analysis and
PostgreSQL for storing these data. But hey I had to invest time behind
setting up a postgres server and learning some elementary sql to just
"see" the data.

I guess, I am in a mood of ranting today :(
-- 
Regards
PK
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