earthweb.com: The concept of an office suite, with word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software, is one that is well understood by users, which is also why it's often difficult to improve them. Users already expect their office suites to do certain things, making the job of office suite developers often one of fit and finish.
Advertisement:
read more

Ashampoo Office a a tiny humble suite that consisted of a word processor (textmaker), a spreadsheet program (planmaker) and a presentation software (presentation). This suite takes just 39.77MB of install space, and 33.25MB of memory.

Not so long ago, IBM teamed up with Canonical to create an application which contains an office suite featuring word processing, spreadsheet and presentation applications based on IBM Lotus Symphony, an e-mail client that is based on IBM Lotus Notes, the social networking and collaboration cloud-based tools provided by LotusLive.com and the underlying Ubuntu operating system.

NeoOffice 2.2.2 is a sharp office productivity suite similar to Microsoft Office for the Mac, and has many features which surpass it. Unlike MS Office, however, NeoOffice is open source and therefore free. Like Office, it includes a word processor called NeoOffice Writer, Calc, a spreadsheet builder, a polished presentation program, Impress, and a database program called Base.

Nearly every desktop computer and laptop has some kind of office or productivity suite. Many of these have several applications in them that can be used together to replace a paper office, but the most common three applications are word processors, spread sheets, and presentation creators/viewers... So what options are available for UNIX/Linux systems?

Some may or may not know that KDE comes with its own built in Office suite known as Koffice. What even fewer people may know is what it actually contains. So in this segment about the Lesser Apps of KDE, we'll be covering Koffice, what it contains and what each part can do for you.

For the past six years or so, my office productivity suite of choice has been OpenOffice.org. In that time, I've watched the suite progress slowly but steadily toward the goal of being "just as good" as Microsoft Office.

If you run Ubuntu, openSUSE, Debian, or Mandriva, among other distributions, then whenever you run OpenOffice.org you don't run the "official" version, but rather Go-OO, an office suite based on the OpenOffice.org source code. Go-OO includes enhancements and functions that haven't been accepted by Sun, and that may never be, because of licensing, business, or other reasons.

OpenOffice.org is the darling of the FOSS office suites, and it is a nice suite. It's cross-platform, and OpenOffice.org Writer is a first-rate word processor with a lot of advanced features. But it's not the only good option for Linux users: Abiword and KWord are excellent lightweight word processors with good feature sets, and both are licensed under the GPL. All three are wonderful. In this two-part series we're going to dig into KWord 1.6, and mine some of its hidden jewels.