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Business reports: Kugar

Kugar can be used to create business-quality reports. A designer helps to easily design such reports.

Database management and forms: Kexi

Kexi is a full-blown database management application. You can design forms for working with data. Many backends, such as PostgreSQL or MySQL, are possible. It is even capable of importing MS Access mdb database files.

Each KOffice component comes with its own manual. These manuals offer all the latest information about the various components KOffice has to offer and should be read to learn more about KOffice. The web site is also a good place to find out more.

The primary site on the Internet is http://www.koffice.org. You will also find information there about the user and developer mailing lists, as well as additional developer resources.

The Kexi project has an additional web site, which can be found at http://www.kexi-project.org.

The following two sections, instead of giving you a rundown of the standard features, explore two interesting features in more depth, in the hope that this will be mouthwatering enough to interest you in exploring KOffice further.

Hands On: Getting to Know KOffice

Now we will work through some examples with KOffice to get to know the office suite. You are very welcome to actually create the documents yourself and play around with the different components as we go along. The purpose of these examples is to get a feeling for KOffice, without trying to be a complete walkthrough, which would fill a complete book on its own. Remember that the handbooks included in the KOffice installation hold much more information that allows you to learn a lot about all the available components.

Using tabulators in KWord

You can use tabulators (tabs) to align text horizontally. This is very useful for simple tables or listings, where text needs to be vertically aligned. Tabulators can also be very useful to simply place text at an exact horizontal location.

KWord has various options for tabulators. You can set different alignments, such as left, right, centered, or alignment on a certain character (such as a comma). In particular, the last type is useful for listing numbers and prices.

Tabulators are part of the paragraph format. So you can configure everything related to tabulators in the Paragraph Settings dialog (Figure 8-33). This dialog can be reached through the Format → Paragraph menu entry.

Now we will create a couple of tab stops. We start with a very intuitive way of editing tabs and later look at some configuration details.

Start up KWord, choose the text-oriented U.S. letter template, and click OK (see Figure 8-34).

Then take a look at the top ruler of your document (Figure 8-35). The white space in the top ruler is exactly the width of the editable area of the document. This space can also be used to enter tab stops. In the top left corner is a small icon that represents the currently selected tab stop type. As already mentioned, tabs can be left aligned, right aligned, centered, or aligned on a certain character. You can change the type by simply clicking on that icon. See how it changes between different types of tab stops. Next you should insert some tab stops by choosing the correct types and placing them at the correct horizontal positions in the top ruler (Figure 8-36).

Figure 8-33. Configuring tabulators in KWord

To do so, first choose the correct type in the upper-left corner and then left-click on the position in the top ruler. Do so for all four tab stops until your upper ruler looks like the one shown in the figure.

To see how the tab stops can be used, simply write some text at each tab stop:

Press the Tab key once. You are now at the first tab stop.

Write a few characters, such as How. You can see that the text is aligned on the right side with the tab, indicating that the first tab stop is right aligned.

Press the Tab key again. You are now at the second tab stop.

Write