Office Programs for Linux
It's been a while since I updated this page. I apologize for that. During that time a lot has changed for Office systems for Linux. There are now more and better choices than ever.
I hopefully will do at least some justice to these products as I review them. If you find that I have overlooked some glaring problem or great feature, feel free to let me know and I'll try to update the page.
OpenOffice / StarOffice 6 beta
Right now I don't know how to differentiate between OpenOffice and StarOffice, so this review is going to cover both of them.
I've been waiting a long time to be able to write something up on OpenOffice other than the fact that it has promise. Now at last a quite stable version is out that has everything I need, (especially spell checking). If you get confused what OpenOffice is, it basically is StarOffice that was turned into a OpenSource project by Sun. I have downloaded both the latest OpenOffice (build 641c) as well as the first StarOffice 6.0 beta, and found that they are so extremely similar, that I've not really found a difference, other than StarOffice integrated itself into my KDE desktop, so I find myself using it more.
Perhaps my most favorite thing is both Suites are available for both Linux and Windows (and Solaris). This allows me to work on the same documents whether my machine is booted in Windows or Linux.
KOffice 1.1.1
KOffice is one of the great leaders in opensource Office Suites. It has broken away from the standard KDE so you usually have to install it on your own. This is OK since it now means that you can install a newer version of KOffice without having to upgrade the rest of your KDE.
KOffice 1.1 was unofficially the first stable release, while 1.1.1 was their first bug fix release. Version 1.0 was forced upon the KOffice team because they were still bound to the main KDE and KDE was ready to release 2.0,
Pro's and Con's: Alot of both. I still think it is the best completely Open Source office suite, but there are still variants that make it unsuitable for some people to use. Perhaps the biggest is that while there is some compatablility with the MS Office suite, it is not as good compatability as one would like.
Corel
Word Perfect Office 2000
I have very mixed feelings about WP Office. But on the whole, I truly cannot recommend it. I wish I could because when it works, it works wonderfully, but when it doesn't, it just doesn't.
The Word Perfect Office 2000 Suite is almost exactly as you would find it in the windows world. There are a few little gizmo's that Corel couldn't put into it's Linux release, but I found that your average user, and even your above average user, doesn't miss those things. (I really don't even remember what they are). So if you want a very smooth and professional Office Suite that works with everything that Word Perfect works with, this product fills the shoe.
There are two huge, glaring problems with this product.
The first is printing. As with any office product, if you can't print, you are in big trouble. The printer setup is automatic, when you open up the Corel Central. You can't setup printers in any other program (such as word perfect), and when you try to print it just keeps telling you to open up Corel Central.
Now the big problem word is automatic. You really have no way to setup your printers. When you open Corel Central, it is supposed to automatically find and setup your printers for you. This is very good in theory, and worked really nice, once. I then decided to add another printer, which naturally changed the linux lpr config file. I never printed again. Not even complete OS reinstalls fixed my problem. Reading through several newgroups and manuals I got the impression that if your lpr config file wasn't exactly how Corel liked it, it basically couldn't do anything. Since everything is automatic, you have no way to force it to do what you want.
The second problem is support. Every program has bugs, it's inevitable. Corel does a fairly good job of putting out patches for Word Perfect and it's Suite. But it did not one thing for it's Linux side, and the patches weren't compatible with it's Linux Office Suite.
Their technical help (say for printers) was quite non-existant as well. Their standard answer was 'It works on my machine'
Word Perfect 8
I do recommend this product if you are just doing document editing. Since it is just the word processor, it doesn't qualify as a Office Suite, but sometimes that's all you need.
This might not be the most up to date word processor, but it definitely does what it's supposed to, and does it quite well. This was written when Corel was dipping it's toes into the Unix market. It tried porting all of it's code to Linux, and did a very good job. They decided that it was too much work though, so this is the only product that came out. (Office 2000 is basically the windows code running on WINE).
If you can find it, there is a free non-commercial use version. It is complete except for saving in HTML and doing vector drawing. It has all the spell and grammar checking, as well as handles graphics very well. It even prints well and works well with the standard Linux printing.
Back Home
Jan. 4, 2002