As we reported earlier this week Calligra 2.4 was released. The majority of users probably don’t know what it is, the reason is a mixed of two things: A change on branding and LibreOffice.

Formerly known as KOffice, Calligra is KDE’s new and shiniest suite of productivity applications. All applications are designed following the same set of guidelines such that a lot of the knowledge obtained by the user while using one of the apps is transferred to other members of the suite.

Moreover, all members are coded to improve interoperability, in other words, all applications integrate with each other. Calligra is, in my eyes, closer to iWork than it is to Microsoft Office or LibreOffice. This can be seen as disadvantage or an advantage depending on one needs, however, my personal opinion on the matter is that is beneficial for most users. Most users would benefit more from a streamlined easy-to-use, light, suite of productivity applications than they would from a less easy, heavier, full featured one.

In my experience, most people only use word processor for relatively basic stuff, don’t get even close to use Excel to its fullest, or any other application found of Microsoft Office. There’s a place for applications of this type, but for the majority of the users this apps are unnecessarily hard to use while wasting their resources. Calligra is here to fill the void.

We’ll take a look at every member independently soon, but to avoid repetition, in this article we’ll revise Calligra’s design elements common among all of its members.

Start Screen

All applications show a similar start screen when launched, these screen are mostly composed of different templates available for each application (of course, you can pick a default set of options and never see it again by checking Always use this template), for example, the following is Sheets’ start screen.

Dockers

Although Dockers seem to lack any formal definition among the KDE community, they’re quite easy to spot. Dockers are basely sidebars that can be docked into any border of the interface, left floating (most of the time), or closed. Perhaps the most broadly known docker is Dolphin’s.

This approach gives user freedom to easily tweak the interface to their lacking, turning on dockers and dragging them around is all is needed. It’s possible to let the dockers floating around, as in the previous screenshot.

This approach is one I personally like, superficially one may think it would make for a less clean interface however this isn’t the case because as soon as the application loses its focus floating dockers disappear.

Moreover, some dockers are shared among different members of Calligra. All dockers among all of Calligra’s app are enabled/disabled in the same place: Settings > Dockers. 

Menubar

All menubars are arranged in the same way: File, Edit, View. As the first three elements, and Settings, Help as the last two. Any other menu needed is in between. This consistent five menus are almost the same across the board (there are some differences in edit, view and settings that change according to the app, as they should, we’ll talk about these differences on each app article).

File:

• New: Creates a new documents.
• Open: Select what document to open.
• Open Recent: A list of the last documents worked on.
•  Save: If the file has not been previously saved, will ask for a location, name, and extension, otherwise, it overwrites the current file.
• Save as: Always asks a name, location and file extension.
• Reload:  Does precisely what it says.
• Versions: Change between different snapshots.
• Import.
• Export.
• Mail.
• Google Online Document: One of the coolest features on Calligra, you can download any document stored on Google Docs by just providing your username and password, not setup involved.
• Print.
• Print Preview
• Document Information: Name, comments, data about the author, etc.
• Close.
• Quit.