Poll: How many people use Calligra office suite?

[woodsmoke]

Hi
A simple yes or no, but if you would like to comment as to why you do or do not, please so do!

woodsmoke

[SteveRiley]

Last week I really tried using Stage to create a presentation. I'm convinced no one has ever actually tried doing that.

The slide type that supposedly creates bulleted lists doesn't. You must manually click the bullet button. That works, but only in a very rudimentary way. Indenting to a second level with the Tab key doesn't work. You have to press the indent button. Once you've indented a line, you cannot "outdent" back on the next line. Rather than displaying a first-level bullet, Stage shows a bullet-less line. Clicking the bullet button automatically indents to the second level. I could not figure out how to force it to use the first level.

Text entry is just totally broken. I'm sure there are lots of aspects of the suite that are cool, but basic usability seems busted.

[woodsmoke]

Hi SR,

Thank you very much for your very pointed reply.

I quite agree.

I keep production of presentations to the VERY BASICS.

If I keep them to the very basics, then things go relatively well.

BUT I must present to the GENTLE READER.....

How many of YOU would actually WANT / NEED to use "the bells and whistles" of another presentation type application.

I gently present a quote from the original MICROSOFT book about Powerpoint (tm).

"There should be very few items on a slide to produce the greatest visual impact".

In other words, not to the estimable SR....but to OTHERS....

A slide should have VERY FEW ELEMENTS.

"indention and outdention" contravenes the "point" of a "Presentation".

The point behind a "Presentation" is to have a visual "hook" for the person that is giving the presentation to "talk around".

The INFORMATION.........should be given as a TEXT HANDOUT.....

Marshall Mcluhan..........."the Medium is the Massage".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Medium_Is_the_Massage







Again, thank you very much for the very pertinent comments SR.

The above was posted for those who have not experienced the "massage" of Calligra.

"massage"

of Calligra.

woodsmoke

[whatthefunk]

I tried to like the spreadsheet program in the Calligra suite, but it was cumbersome and, if I remember correctly, couldnt save as .xls which unfortunately is a deal breaker for me.

[woodsmoke]

Thank you very much WhattheFunk for the very pointedk, and PERTINENT, comment about not exporting or saving as a simple '.xls"

I find that in the latest version for Ubu 14.04 that, aside from other open formats, that it will only "save as" or "export to" ... "LibreOffice spreadsheet.

Now, I, personally, am more than willing to go through two "things" if I have to interact with MS stuff.

AND, as in I stated in another thread, I MINIMIZE formatting and such to basically what is "html" compatible.

But that is just me...." Open source or die"... for which I was much chastized at other fora as being "extremist".

But YOU DO HAVE A VALID POINT!!! Thanks muchly for the comment!!

woodsmoke

[whatthefunk]

Thank you very much WhattheFunk for the very pointedk, and PERTINENT, comment about not exporting or saving as a simple '.xls"

I find that in the latest version for Ubu 14.04 that, aside from other open formats, that it will only "save as" or "export to" ... "LibreOffice spreadsheet.

Now, I, personally, am more than willing to go through two "things" if I have to interact with MS stuff.

AND, as in I stated in another thread, I MINIMIZE formatting and such to basically what is "html" compatible.

But that is just me...." Open source or die"... for which I was much chastized at other fora as being "extremist".

But YOU DO HAVE A VALID POINT!!! Thanks muchly for the comment!!

woodsmoke

As much as I would like to avoid Microsoft formats, my employer insists on .xls so my hands are tied. For non-work related things, I always save in open formats.

[claydoh]

I use it, or rather I use mainly Words often, though not exclusively. LibreOffice is still my main tool. I am waiting for Author to have more unique features. I am a light user of office suite software in general, so outside of spreadsheet/word processing, I am fairly lacking in knowledge and skill using any of the other tools in any suite, so I can't really attest to any merits either may have over the other.

The lack of export capability is a serious issue in some parts of the world, true. However, a small caveat to that is exporting to pdf seems to work quite well in Calligra. My work seems to use pdf files for just about all docs except for spreadsheets that need editability, so I have had little trouble with compatibility there.

[dmeyer]

Lyx/Latex master race checking-in. Seriously, once you've got the hang of it, nothing else comes even remotely close! It's super fast, infinitely powerful, perfectly portable, and more stable than Swiss neutrality. It's like comparing stone tools to German precision engineering.

[whatthefunk]

Lyx/Latex master race checking-in. Seriously, once you've got the hang of it, nothing else comes even remotely close! It's super fast, infinitely powerful, perfectly portable, and more stable than Swiss neutrality. It's like comparing stone tools to German precision engineering.

What program do you use for Latex?

[GreyGeek]

Lyx/Latex .....once you've got the hang of it.....

Very powerful indeed, but Lyx is not. Still lots of necessary manual command codes to utilize its full power. Sort of like comparing emacs to a modern GUI RAD tool.

Calligra doesn't even show promise. I tried KOffice shortly before it was replaced by Calligra and found that suite unsuitable for any kind of need the suite pretended to address. About a year ago I installed the full Calligra suite and decided to try and learn it. It took only a day before I uninstalled it. Main problems for me: no compatibility with .doc or .docx, or a large variety of other formats, and the spreadsheet stunk. My sense of its problem was that it was designed wrong from the ground up, and certainly those who write it and test it have never used it or Office or LibreOffice.

I used LibreOffice a couple years ago to write our family's gemology after my wife spent over 20 years researching and collecting the information. What made it easy was the Master Document concept in LibreOffice, which worked perfectly. From the Master Document I could create titles, table of contents, indexes and link in chapters, all while maintaining an accurate document page numbering, and correlation between items and page numbers in the index, footnote numbering, table numbering, and the link between graphics and text. When I was done the document was 256 pages and printed beautifully on my duplex laser. Creating font, headers, footings and other styles using the "Navigator" was easy.

[dmeyer]

What program do you use for Latex?

Depends on what I am doing. I would say I spend 90% of my time in Lyx. I really don't feel the need to ever use functionality beyond what I can get with Lyx and ERT. The other 10% of the time is in KTikz. The only reason for that is because the past few weeks I've had to output a ton of diagrams for assignments and its a great tool for that. If I need to then I can and sometimes do work with Kile. I am just as proficient in pure LaTeX as Lyx but with Lyx I've set up custom style files etc so that my workflow is so perfectly tuned that I can produce perfect papers every time exactly as I want them in next to no time. Also, because I bothered to do my own style files etc, I can just share them to my friends which I do and combined with Lyx's great collaboration tools are great to work with. The only thing Lyx really needs is to do is maybe integrate Biblatex since Bibtex is just terrible at handling newer non traditional sources. KBibtex is absolutely great. Definitely comparable with Zotero but has some more advanced and interesting features. KBibtex does need some updating though for the same reason as Lyx's referencing implementation.

For pure LaTeX though, Kile is hands down the best I have used and I have used a lot. In my friend group Kile is so prolific that I can't really think of anyone who doesn't use it, even if they do so through a VM or some port. To be fair though, LaTeX is only really functional on Linux or OSX so Windows users end up using a VM anyways.

[claydoh]

I would compare LibreOffice and Calligra in this way:
Think MS Office and MS Works.

One is far more powerful, but the other will do ok for the casual home user.

[woodsmoke]

great bunch of comments folks KEEP 'em coming!

As to Lax/Latex dmeyer recommended it to me last year and I gave it a whirl but couldn't get into it.

dmeyer

Of what are you a teacher?

woodsmoke

[dmeyer]

great bunch of comments folks KEEP 'em coming!

As to Lax/Latex dmeyer recommended it to me last year and I gave it a whirl but couldn't get into it.

dmeyer

Of what are you a teacher?

woodsmoke

Teacher? Hell no. I don't have the required patience or fortitude. I am a student and I have to math a lot

Lyx/Latex has a very steep learning curve and I'd had hazard to say that its a bit much for people outside the traditional STEM fields. Though if you do a lot of math and physics its not even up for debate!

[woodsmoke]

K
woodsmoke