Calligra Office - Anyone using it?

[NickStone]

Having KDE on my laptop I thought I'd use a QT based office product and decided to install Calligra Office (Words, Sheets, Flow, Kexi, Stage and a few others). I can use the packages without any real issues, but one thing I would like to be able to do is link data from one package to another but as of yet I have not found any way of doing this except using Copy/Paste.

Also I would like to use mailmerge but am unable to find this or use this feature in Words or Kexi.

Anyone use Calligra Office in a professional manner or is it just a home users version of Libre Office / Microsoft Office?

[dequire]

I use it daily and I would consider what I do "semi-professional" but I do not have any use for mail merge or linking text through different apps. The one area to me it is still lacking in is that it does not support embedded hyperlinking which is still a minor issue for me. However it opens MS docs far better than LO or Oo. It does not, however, save back to docx format.

Having KDE on my laptop I thought I'd use a QT based office product and decided to install Calligra Office (Words, Sheets, Flow, Kexi, Stage and a few others). I can use the packages without any real issues, but one thing I would like to be able to do is link data from one package to another but as of yet I have not found any way of doing this except using Copy/Paste.

Also I would like to use mailmerge but am unable to find this or use this feature in Words or Kexi.

Anyone use Calligra Office in a professional manner or is it just a home users version of Libre Office / Microsoft Office?

[eggbert]

I like where caligra is heading, but not being able to save in office formats is a show stopper for me. Sure, you can save it in open document format, but it just causes confusion for others and they just end up asking you to just send it in doc or xls anyway. Just not worth the hassle. Also, not much of a fan of LO either. I still get plenty of ms office documents that don't work right with it, and I find the LO user interface woeful.

[woodsmoke]

shhhh....don't tell anyone....

The latest MSoffice opens and reads and diplays odp, odt and gnumeric and lo spreads.

The cut to the chase is not for "Calligra" to try to export or whatever to a MS format....Let MS open odp, or odt or .xls(LO format, then save as .xls)

The only "trick" for something like Calligra Stage, is to use a "generic" font that does not need complex xml coding by MS to display it in a .odp.

Ummm the RECOMMENDED font for ANY thing that is going onto the net is Arial. So do text in Arial and MSproducts will have no problems.

The simple fact of the matter is that MS products "handle" images in a manner differently than MAC which handles things differently than say...WordPerfect....

The only "problem" is that of one inserts a huge image and then drags it resize it then, when it is opened in MS products it "may" resize to the original size and one might have a prblem even getting at the corners to drage it to resize.

The SIMPLE "fix" is to not resize the image IN Calligra Stage.... the fix is to resize it EARLIER in an image app...and then save and insert that.

One is resizing and saving etc. anyway....the difference is when it is done.

AND.....to be able to RESIZE it to just perfectly squeeency eeency tweeeky it for one's magnum opus presentation .....

save it kinda SMALLER than what one really needs....... and then drag it larger in Calligra....so it cannot in any way explode is size in the MSproduct. It will actually go DOWN in size if it reformats itself.

So then, at least the text can be seen and one can resize later.

WHATEVER ONE DOES THOUGH....

NEVER, NEVER, NEVER alter the presentation in the MS product it "may" place a bogus wrapper around it and say that some of the slides are corrupt the next time that one opens it.

The best thing to do is to save to a cd or a DVD so that MS cannot put the wrapper on the file.

Other than the above small caveats MS opens odp, odt and either .xls or .csv just fine.

THE EXCEPTION.....is if the corporation/university is "under the thumb" of MS.....let us say... they get a really huge discount for bulk deployments.....the entity can and WILL agree that MS can add a "wrapper" to any and all things that are not absolutely the latest MS format, and MS will CHECK to see and one is out of luck.

That is not a problem with Calligra that is a problem with the entity for whom one works.

Again, the fix is to save to a non writable media.

The above could be expanded, in terms of "tricks" if anyone desires, but the above is the nutshell.

woodsmoke

[eggbert]

The latest MSoffice opens and reads and diplays odp, odt and gnumeric and lo spreads.

The cut to the chase is not for "Calligra" to try to export or whatever to a MS format....Let MS open odp, or odt or .xls(LO format, then save as .xls)

Nice in theory, but unrealistic when your "officy" colleagues, for whatever reason, become disoriented unless you give them a .doc or .xls. It typically goes something like:

"OMG this file has a strange extension, We need .doc files!!"

"But you can open this in Word..."

"OMG this file has a strange extension, We need .doc files!!"

"Sigh.."

The really frustrating this is that 99.9% of the time, the contents of their precious .doc could be plain text.

[woodsmoke]

Hi Egbert.
I agree my assumption was that the items would be used by the person reading this thread.
So thank you for indicating my rather egregious error.
Woodembarrassedsmoke

[PaulW2U]

Anyone use Calligra Office in a professional manner or is it just a home users version of Libre Office / Microsoft Office?

I have a large spreadsheet that I originally created in Excel and developed in LibreOffice. It continues to grow and I use it daily. I tried to open and edit it in Calligra but I was very disappointed. Each load and save would take several minutes and much of the formatting was either missing or corrupt. Attempts at editing other files in Calligra have been equally disappointing.

I really should do some more tests on directly importing from Excel to Calligra to see if using LibreOffice has had a detrimental effect on exporting to Calligra Sheets.

At the moment I'm not prepared to admit that Calligra (Sheets) is ready for professional use which is a shame as clearly a lot of work has gone into it.

[calligrafan]

I am a Calligrafan . But it is very difficult to accede to the most actual version on existent systems (and it would be really needed as all functions needed by a good modern text processing are not yet already improved in Calligra...)

[ATHoneycutt]

I have been using LibreOffice on my main W7 PC, House W7 PC, and my MacBook with Kubuntu 12.04.2 with no issues but I want to try to work in Calligra as it is a qt application so it looks better intergated.