What is Koffice ? Koffice vs MS Office

Those who use Windows Operating System, use Microsoft's Office suite of applications which comprises of MS Word, MS Excel, MS PowerPoint etc. The Microsoft Office software is very useful but not available free. For those who wonder if there is any free office software then you can try switching to Linux from Windows. In Linux, KOffice is a free and wonderful office software suite. Not only KOffice, you can also try the free OpenOffice in linux.

KDE is a linux desktop environment and KOffice is the short form of KDE Office which runs in this environment. You can get details about the KOffice at www.koffice.org

Here are the applications that constitute KOffice.

KWord

KWord is similar to MS Word and is a word processor. You can use KWord to create documents.

KSpread

KSpread is similar to MS Excel and is a spreadsheet application. You can use KSpread to do mathematical calculations and create charts.

KPresenter

KPresenter is similar to MS PowerPoint and is a Presentation software. You can use KPreseter to create slide shows.

In addition to the three applications mentioned above, KOffice also contains KChart, KPlato, Krita, Kontour, Kformula, Kugar, Kivio.

Right from the old RedHat to the latest linux distros such as SuSe, Mandrake, Debian etc, you will find KOffice. KOffice is available in both RPM format as well as tar.bz2 format. You can download KOffice at www.koffice.org and install it in your linux computer.

It is important to note that you can use your existing documents created in MS Word or Excel in KOffice. You can open MS Word documents in KWord. Similarly you can open Workbooks created in MS Excel in KSpread.

KWord features

If you are familiar with MS Word then it is easy for you to change and adapt to KWord. Most of the menus and tool bars are similar in both MS Word and KWord. Even functionalities are almost the same.

You can format letters, paragraphs, pages just like in MS Word. In short all that you can do in MS Word, you can also do in KWord.

You can insert Footnote, Endnote, Hyperlink and others in KWord. Similarly header, footer, page numbers also can be inserted.

Spelling correction and 'Auto Correction' features are available in KWord.

Just like the MS Word, KWord also has the 'Multi columns' feature which enables showing the document in many sections or vertically.

KSpread features

Like Excel, KSpread also has many worksheets in a workbook. You can do your calculations in each of these worksheets. You can use formula and functions in cells.

You can create charts based on data in selected cells. You can create many types of charts. You can convert one type of chart to another type.

You can use the data in a spreadsheet as a small database. You can sort the data based on acending or descending order of numbers or text.