Other Software > Found Deals and Discounts
Kingsoft Office 2013 PRO giveaway
Curt:
oh yeah, the advertised price was not the full $70, but merely $30. Yet another important detail missed. I am beginning to be really embarrassed...
TaoPhoenix:
With LibreOffice and OpenOffice available for free forever, see no need to ever pay for an office suite except maybe MS if your needs dictate.
-Midnight Rambler (June 18, 2013, 05:23 AM)
--- End quote ---
I'll go back to this for a minute.
Having glanced at the spirit of the LibreOffice split, OpenOffice is apparently on its way out.
But then even then it's a "two horse meta-race". There's MS from way back for all its reasons, and then for a long time what is now LibreOffice has been generally seen as the most steady contender on the free side.
For me it's not even really about the money - free is nice as long as you tap that angle, but eventually I might shell out for a copy of MS Office 2010 or something Just Because. Instead, it's about the details of the features and bugs and interoperability and use cases.
Let's do a couple of notes:
Switching away from IE to Firefox was pretty easy, and for better or worse I'm on Firefox for a long time to come.
Using LibreOffice on a home machine that never had MS Office has done okay so far, though I haven't tried to do any really fancy scripting practice etc. I've warned a couple of recruiters to watch for minor formatting glitches etc, but no catastrophes there yet.
But then it gets murkier. I haven't yet found any fatal flaws in LibreOffice that would lead me to keep galavanting around multiple office suites from these companies scrounging for the mindshare scraps. I get the spirit of it all - but my last brief foray there ended with Gnumeric beginning to fall fatally behind when it stopped being able to handle newer items from MS Office.
So I'll go look at it after this post as more of a "gee, this is a fun hour's entertainment" point of view, probably looking for holistic impressions on the GUI. But to me it feels a little dangerous to bounce back and forth at whim between office programs until some combination of quirks stacks up on your document until it finally breaks and then you don't know which one (or maybe just the anti-synergy!) broke it.
Edit: I just saw this part of the site promo:
"The first thing you’ll see when you open the newly released Kingsoft Office Suite Pro 2013 is a clean, new interface. The old features are still there along with 38 major improvements.
...
Two interfaces: 2013 and classical ones. Two color schemes for 2013 interface: elegant black and water blue."
So that gives me something to chew on, to see what they fiddled with for the two interfaces. Quick early wondering: Whether it's "Before and After Ribbon".
Also the site seems to say there's under 12 hours left, so if y'all wanna try it, don't dawdle!
TaoPhoenix:
oh yeah, the advertised price was not the full $70, but merely $30. Yet another important detail missed. I am beginning to be really embarrassed...
-Curt (June 18, 2013, 02:08 PM)
--- End quote ---
Heh Curt, go back and edit your topic Newspaper Style! After all, anyone who believes they saw anything different is a lunatic, right?!
But yeah, you just blasted out a review, but then it's easier for others to poke holes in an existing item than to nail it cold from scratch! So hang in there!
TaoPhoenix:
Kingsoft Office Trial Notes "live" as they happen:
1. The EULA still lists the trial as 30 days. So I have to either ignore that or find where it becomes the free year. Also it connects to Giveaway site with some special file so you need to actually install it in this trial period, not just download it and "do it later".
The latest wrinkle in EULA's seems to be this clause:
Admission
You acknowledge that you have now read and understood the EULA and have expressly agreed to be bound by all the terms and conditions of it.
2. Yep, the whole interface thing is definitely between "Office 2003 look-alike" and "After-Ribbon 2007+". One key feature of MS Office 2010 that I haven't yet mastered from the LibreOffice side is making your own custom Ribbon, so I'll glance at this one to see if that's there or not. I'll also look to see if the interface toggles in-program at a single switch or if you have to re-install it! (But see above about the time limit on installs!)
Watch out for the attempt for it to insert itself into browser favorites and the PermaTab extension for Firefox (which it informs me is not even available in this edition for Firefox 20+!)
It pulls a "thank you for installing" browser page. Among other things, note this sentence:
"Just add our application to your Facebook page and it will remind you and your friends about a new giveaway on a daily basis."
So that means Facebook is also usurping what used to be "newsletter emails" by now making them "newsletter posts on your facebook page, but this time they get your friend's eyeballs as well"!
3. It tries to put "authorship" on your documents - I can see how someone could want that, so if you want your privacy, for "name", I just put a random letter character in.
Meanwhile it does pop a box "hey click here to change user interface", so that's smart - it saves you from having to fish for it right off under some awful "tools/settings/advanced/interface/" kind of menu, though I bet it's somewhere in there like that too for later. FYI it's a little "shirt" icon in the top right corner, so after you get rid of the big "hey you" box, there it is. Not bad of an idea. More notes on that side later.
There is a sort of "pseudo-home" button in the top left that seems to have some of the old style command breakdowns, so that's nice. But the button sits there changing colors dynamically, so that could get annoying quick. There might be a setting somewhere to make that go static. I'll hunt for that later too.
It does also look like you can use that "pseudo-home" button to drop down to "tools/options" for typical "option-y" stuff. Also "Switch-UI" is there too besides the shirt icon. Remember, the UI's are modular so you can have for example the new Ribbon-y interface on Spreadsheet and the Classic one on Writer.
Speaking of Writer, either they are trying to fly under the radar / paid MS for some rights, but they seem to have done a better job matching up to the MS location of features, and that might be the kind of thing that begins to be a selling point vs LibreOffice. (Which I just installed to give this program "free shot at defaults" because I had a strange bug in L-O Spreadsheet that locked some old data into the default template somewhere!)
Meanwhile assuming it doesn't have a "time bomb" that blows up in a year, I can't see where it's doing any 1-year countdowns, so it might just possibly last longer than a year as is. (Which would be nice!) But even so, a year is a "long time", so let's say stuff like these switchable UI's finally sell you on one of these programs, part of my changing focus is to "get this year's work done, and worry about next year, next year". A year is TOTALLY different than 30 days. P.S. It's a Chinese company, if that matters to anyone.
Okay, so it's a done deal leaving K-S Writer on Classic. I'll go re-install Libre and compare the two of those later via UI stuff.
On a test file in K-S Writer, it's doing the whole "red-underline" thing for "auto-spellcheck", which isn't bad. I might have turned that off in Libre, but I now do vaguely recall wrestling a little with the spell check in Libre Writer. The regular spell check seems okay with only a 30 second test. Word Count is under Tools/Word Count.
TaoPhoenix:
4. In MS Office Excel 2010, the "custom ribbon" feature was activated by "right-clicking in a ribbon". Since that doesn't seem to be possible here, I went back to the Classic layout. Interestingly, since I've never worked with "powerpoint/clones" in my life, that might be really fascinating to switch back and forth those layouts to test "intuitiveness".
A wild question might be, if LibreOffice is a US-Based project and "easier to get at", maybe advice from legal counsel forced them to move their settings around to avoid legal issues from MS. But what if K-O, being Chinese, is "harder to get to", and could afford to actually match the MS settings!? That might just be a tipping point! Plus that "double interface" could be fascinating - you go Classic to "Get your work done" then occasionally flip to Ribbon to poke at new features on a rainy day when you decide you want to think "outside the box". That's because there IS in fact stuff on those ribbons - it just caused frustration because the 30 "workhorse features" you used to use vanished on you.
So, quick summary, this might be a serious contender for me UI wise! More info to come later!
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