Information KDE Home News FAQs Getting Involved   Installing KOffice Sources Binaries Mirrors   KOffice Components KWord KSpread KPresenter KIllustrator KImageShop Katabase KFormula KChart KImage Filters Information Tutorial Links   Contact Information Developers Bug Reporting Mailing Lists   Supporting KOffice Supporting KOffice Supporters of KOffice	Filters for KOffice Do we really need them? In my opinion we definitely need filters because a important factor influencing the success of an office suite is the ability to import and export documents. Of course this is not critical stuff like printing or a nice and straightforward user interface, but it's not just a "nice-to-have" feature, either. Just imagine a user working in a heterogenous environment using KOffice among other office suites. Sometimes it is necessary to exchange documents as we all know. Now the adventure begins: Which format do I use (i.e. Which format is supported by both office suites)? How much information is lost due to internal differences between the office suites (e.g. formatting, tables, pictures, columns,...)? What about the character sets (i.e. the encoding of umlauts and so on)? Can I use Unicode characters in the other office suite? Another problem is that some vendors of proprietary office suites provide inaccurate and/or incomplete documentation of the file formats (or no information at all). This is one of the obstacles we face because it's really time consuming to search for information in a binary file as you can imagine... (At this place I'd like to thank Espen Sand for his brillant KHexEditor). Are there any filters, yet? Well, at the moment all parts of KOffice support the filter architecture (read: the parts are able to use filters), but there are working filters only for some parts. These include: An ASCII (i.e. plain text) import and export filter for KWord A HTML import and export filter for KWord A CSV (Comma Separated Values) import and export filter for KSpread We are currently developing: A MS WinWord 97(tm) import filter for KWord A MS Excel 97(tm) import filter for KSpread A RTF import and export filter for KWord I can think of many filters we'd like to have, but sadly we are only a few developers. Do you want to join us? How to use a filter? The Koffice Library Developers have done a magnificent job and you will not even notice when you use a filter to convert a file to the part's native format. Ok, you can see it (debug output), but there is no difference for you at all. Just select File -> Open... or File -> Save (File -> Save As...) and choose the extension which should be used. Select (or name) the file and off you go :) Maintained by the KOffice Web team. Last modified May 05, 2000.