Office.
Open source developers are always trying to make it easier for people to build applications and help in development. To this end, there are a number of widgets or toolkits that other developers can use to rapidly create and deploy GUI applications. These widgets control things such as drop-down lists, Save As dialogs, window buttons, and general look and feel. Unfortunately, whereas Windows and Apple developers have to worry about only one set of widgets each, Linux has a plethora of different widgets, including GTK+, QT, and Motif. What is worse is that these widgets are incompatible with one another, making it difficult to easily move a finished application from one widget set to another.
GTK is an acronym for
Here are some of the primary components of the Gnome Office suite that are available in Fedora:
> AbiWord — This word processing program enables you to compose, format, and organize text documents and has some compatibility with the Microsoft Word file format. It uses plug-ins (programs that add functionality such as language translation) to enhance its functionality.
> Gnumeric — This spreadsheet program enables you to manipulate numbers in a spreadsheet format. Support for all but the most esoteric Microsoft Excel functions means that users should have little trouble trading spreadsheets with Excel users.
> The GIMP — This graphics application enables you to create images for general use. It can import and export all common graphic file formats. The GIMP is analogous to Adobe's Photoshop application and is described in Chapter 7, 'Multimedia.'
> Evolution — Evolution is a mail client with an interface similar to Microsoft Outlook, providing email, scheduling, and calendaring. It is described in Chapter 5, 'On the Internet.'
The loose association of applications known as Gnome Office includes several additional applications that duplicate the functionality of applications already provided by Fedora. Those extra GNOME applications are not included in a default installation of Fedora to eliminate redundancy. They are all available from the Gnome Office website, at http://www.gnome.org/projects/ooo/. Both The GIMP and Evolution are available with Fedora by default. You have to use yum or pirut to retrieve the remaining components.
Fedora provides the AbiWord editor as part of its Extras, shown in Figure 6.14. AbiWord can import XML, Microsoft Word, RTF, UTF8, plain text, WordPerfect, KWord, and a few other formats. AbiWord is notable for its use of plug-ins, or integrated helper applications, that extend its capabilities. These plug-ins add language translation, HTML editing, a thesaurus, a Linux command shell, and an online dictionary, among other functions and features. If you just need a straightforward but powerful word processing application, you should examine AbiWord.
FIGURE 6.14 AbiWord is a word processing program for Fedora, GNOME, and X11. It handles some formats that OpenOffice.org cannot, but does not yet do well with Microsoft Word formats.
AbiWord is not installed by default in Fedora; instead, you need to use Add/Remove Programs to retrieve it. Just search for AbiWord, and install the package.
After you've installed AbiWord, it becomes available under Applications, Office, AbiWord. If you are familiar with Microsoft Works, the AbiWord interface will be familiar to you because its designers based the interface upon Works.
You can use the Gnumeric spreadsheet application to perform financial calculations and to graph data, as shown in Figure 6.15. It can import comma- or tab-separated files, text, or files in the Gnumeric XML format, saving files only as XML or text. You need to install Gnumeric using either Add/Remove Software or the following command:
# yum install gnumeric
To launch Gnumeric from the menu, choose Applications, Office, Gnumeric Spreadsheet.
FIGURE 6.15 GNOME's Gnumeric is a capable financial data editor — here working with the same spreadsheet used earlier. OpenOffice.org also provides a spreadsheet application, as does KOffice.
After you press Enter, the main Gnumeric window appears. You enter data in the spread sheet by clicking a cell and then typing in the text box. To create a graph, you click and drag over the spreadsheet cells to highlight the desired data, and then you click the Graph Wizard icon in Gnumeric's toolbar. Gnumeric's graphing component launches, and you are guided through a series of dialogs to create a graph. When you have finished, you can click and drag a blank area of your spreadsheet, and the graph appears.
The Project Planner application is useful for tracking the progress of projects, much like its Windows counterpart, Microsoft Project. When the main window is displayed, you can start a new project or import an existing project. The application provides three views: Resources, Gantt Charts, and Tasks.
Working with KOffice
The KDE office suite KOffice was developed to provide tight integration with the KDE desktop. Integration enables objects in one application to be inserted in other applications via drag-and-drop, and all the applications can communicate with each other, so a change in an object is instantly communicated to other applications. The application integration provided by KDE is a significant enhancement to productivity. (Some GNOME desktop applications share a similar communication facility with each other.) If you use the KDE desktop rather than the default GNOME desktop, you can enjoy the benefits of this integration, along with the Konqueror web and file browser.
The word processor for KOffice is KWord. KWord is a frames-based word processor, meaning that document pages can be formatted in framesets that hold text, graphics, and objects in enclosed areas. Framesets can be used to format text on a page that includes columnar text and images that the text needs to flow around, making KWord an excellent choice for creating documents other than standard business letters, such as newsletters and brochures.
KWord and other components of KOffice are still under development and lack all the polished features of OpenOffice.org and AbiWord. However, it does have the ability to work with the OpenDocument format found in OpenOffice.org, as well as limited compatibility with Microsoft file formats.
You can access the KOffice components from the Office menu.
KWord asks you to select a document for your session. The KWord client, shown in Figure 6.16, offers sophisticated editing capabilities, including desktop publishing.
FIGURE 6.16 The KOffice KWord word processing component is a sophisticated frames- based WYSIWYG editor that is suitable for light desktop publishing, supporting several formats, including WordPerfect.
The KOffice KSpread client is a functional spreadsheet program that offers graphing capabilities. Like KWord, you can access KSpread from the Office menu.
KDE includes other productivity clients in its collection of KOffice and related applications. These clients include an address book, time tracker, calculator, notepad, and scheduler. One popular client is KOrganizer, which provides daily, weekly, work week, and monthly views of tasks, to-do lists, and scheduled appointments with background alarms. A journal, or diary, function is also supported within it, and you can synchronize information with your Palm Pilot. You can launch this client from the Office menu.
Figure 6.17 shows a typical KOrganizer window.
FIGURE 6.17 KDE's KOrganizer client supports editing of tasks and schedules that you can sync with your
