2.3. Office software.

Section quotes:

• "A lost ounce of gold may be found, a lost moment of time never."
      -- found on 'fortune-mod'
• "The reward for working hard is more hard work."
      -- found on 'fortune-mod'
• "The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable."
      -- John Kenneth Galbraith
• "If bankers can count, how come they have eight windows and only four tellers?"
      -- found on 'fortune-mod'

Section contents:

• 2.3.1. Introduction.
• 2.3.2. GNOME Office.
• 2.3.3. K Office.
• 2.3.4. Open Office.
• 2.3.5. Other related applications.
• 2.3.6. Viewing PDF files.
• 2.3.7. Personal organizers.
• 2.3.8. Web page designers.
• 2.3.9. Some tricks.
• 2.3.10. Text editors.

2.3.1. Introduction.

There are applications suite like KOffice and OpenOffice, those powerful integrated applications can interact with each other, on the other hand we have separated application for a specific office task, as abiword word processor and gnumeric spreadsheets, those application are more fast and light weighted.

Tip

PDF is a protable independent format that can be printed any where else, you may use any application to create a PDF file, select print (from file) and select print to file as a printer!! if it did not support PDF but PS instead use the command line tool ps2pdf convert it.

Tip

If you are making a PDF file, make sure you include fonts in the file, so that it could be printed or viewed in computer that does not have those fonts, for example in kword select file -> print, the click options the put choose 'Embed fonts in PostScript data'.

2.3.2. GNOME Office.

A set of fast yet powerful separated applications that look and feel the GNOME way see 'www.gnome.org/gnome-office'

AbiWord (www.abisource.com)
The fastest word processor for GNOME desktop, there are versions for Windows and other platforms.
gnumeric (www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric)
A very fast yet powerful spreadsheets for GNOME desktop. It supports drag and drop and statistcal analyses.
GnuCash (www.gnucash.org)
Personal finance tracking program, it's a full featured like multiple accounts, double entry, networks and support QIF standard. It's a GTK+ 1.0 application.
MagicPoint ( www.mew.org/mgp)
A slide-show presentation editor and viewer for GNOME desktop, it's like MS PowerPoint.
Planner (formerly called Mr. Project)
A project manager and planning application.

2.3.3. K Office.

KOffice is one of the fastest integrated complete offcie suites, for KDE desktop, it could be your best choice, see www.koffice.org for more information.

kword Word processor. kspread Spreadsheets. kpresenter Slide show presentations like MS PowerPoint. kugar Business reports maker. KPlato Project manager. kchart Chart drawing tool. kivio flowcharts maker. kformula Formula (equations) editor. kontour Vector graphic designer. krita KDE advanced bitmap designer, like GIMP but less every thing. kljtool An HP Laserjet control panel for KDE (it's not part of KOffice). klpq Printer queue manager (it's not part of KOffice).

2.3.4. Open Office.

Most heavy weight full featured Office suite started by Sun Microsystems, it's very slow compared to others but it supposed to have more features, it's a multi-platform application see www.openoffice.org.

It contain a word processor, spreadsheet, impressing slide-show presenation, a vector graphic drawing, and mathematical formula, it supports ODBC database.

Tip

To make open-office programs start faster you could use quick start applet, in GNOME right click where you want to put it (beside the clock) then select add then OpenOffice quick starter, you run it by hand as ooqstart_applet (ooqstart-gnome or oooqs-kde) or run any openoffice binary with '--quickstart option

2.3.5. Other related applications.

• hancom-office One of the first suites that support asian languages, it's not common because it's not free as GNU or Debian, it's produces by Hancom the producer of Hancom Linux which is no more free.
• star-office Sun Microsystems original commercial office, it's ver similar to OpenOffice.

If you have many MS word documents (.doc) you may convert them all at once to any other open format using wvWare (http://wvware.sf.net) tools (Mandrake and Debian call it's package 'wv'), those tools are : wvHtml, wvLatex, wvCleanLatex, wvPS, wvDVI, wvPDF and wvText. use it like this 'wvHtml hello.doc hello.html' you can use 'wvMime' to display MS word documents in GNOME file manager or ggv.

2.3.6. Viewing PDF files.

There are many of PDF viewers like 'gv', 'ghostview' and 'ghostscript' but the most beautiful (also fast) one is 'kghostview' it even bypass GNOME application that do the same job that is 'ggv' (some times called gnome-gv) the last two are nice looking and offer many features like fullscreen but I like most 'xpdf' the most ugly looking one but very fast and offer more features (searching for example), 'xpdf' is rewritten to give 'gpdf' which is nice looking fastest full featured viewer, there are also 'kpdf'.

2.3.7. Personal organizers.

kpilot and jpilot are Palm pilot sync tool the first is for KDE and the other is for GNOME. Evolution also could be used. We also have those related tools korganizer A compete calender, scheduling and organizing appointments, contacts,projects,...,etc kaddressbook An address book. kalarm Alarm messages. karm time ticker to keep track of time kandy Download phone book from mobile to KAddressBook. knotes and kjots Sticky notes messages.

jpilot screenshot

2.3.8. Web page designers.

You can use word processors (in any office suite) and save it in HTML format, you may use more specific application like Mozilla Composer, Netscape Composer and the most new nVU (pronounced new View) which does not need any HTML experience, but more specialized applications like 'bluefish' and 'Quanta Plus' which could be used to create dynamic interactive sites.

2.3.9. Some tricks.

To write complicated formulas or embed pictures in text, you may use hidden table method, for example see this table and see how it look if we hide the borders:

A= B+C D+E

A= B+C D+E

you also could put table inside another table, and you could use super script and sub-script to make fractions for example ²/₃, we make 2 as super script and 3 as sub-script.

2.3.10. Text editors.

The flame war between VIM and EMACS users is one of the oldest wars (they are the oldest text editors even before GUIs), imagin that EMACS has games and interpter for AI lisp language, syntax highlighting is a conventional feature in them. There are 'nano' which replaces 'pico', where as 'jeo' is for wordstar lovers. If you want normal user friendly simple text editors :

• gedit GNOME text editor, which support text syntax coloring.
• kate/kwrite/kedit KDE text editors, the simplest one 'kedit' and most powerful 'kate' which gives you a terminal, syntax coloring and it put text in hierarchical tree so you hide/show them.
• nedit a light fast ugly Windows-looking text editor that can do syntax coloring.
• mcedit part of 'mc' package, it is a consol program, it could help you when the X graphical environment is down, make sure it's installed we will use it.