Working with MS Office Word documents in Linux OS

KOffice

KOffice represents an office suite which generally comes with Linux distributions having KDE desktop environment. As the previous solutions it’s completely free software that uses OpenDocument file formats as default ones (but just in the components which are OpenOffice’s counterparts). It’s compatible with Windows, Linux and MacOS.

Due to the fact that KOffice does not have such a great amount of releases as MS Office and OpenOffice do, developers emphasize that its current version – KOffice 2.0.0 – being released on May 28, 2009, is mainly aimed at developers, testers and early adopters. It is not supposed to be used by end users, and they do not recommend Linux distributions to package it as the default office suite yet. The main reason for that is that KOffice still have some bugs and incompatibilities, which have to be solved.

However even now it represents very functional package that consists of many different useful components:

KWord – a word processor with style sheets and frame-support for DTP-style editing of complex layouts.

KSpread – a spreadsheet application with multiple sheet support, templates and more than 100 mathematical formulas.

KPresenter – a presentation program with image and effect support.

Kivio – a programmable flowchart drawing program with dynamically loadable stencils.

Krita – a bitmap graphics manipulation program, primarily designed as a painting program, with some image processing features.

Karbon14 – a vector drawing application with a variety of drawing and editing tools.

Kugar and KChart represent integrated report and chart generators.

KFormula – an integrated mathematical formula editor.

KPlato – a project management application that can create Gantt-style charts.

Kexi – an integrated data management application, designed as a Microsoft Access competitor. It has limited compatibility with the MS Access file format.