KOffice.org

The KOffice team is happy to announce the first release candidate of KOffice 2.1. As usual, the team has worked diligently and has now been able to remove all the release blocker bugs. See the full changelog for the details.

The application that has received the most bugfixes is once again Krita. Also KWord has seen numerous improvements in many places, and the Microsoft Word filter has once again been improved. The same goes for KPresenter and its Powerpoint import filter and KSpread.

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Today, Nokia announced at the Maemo Summit 2009 that they have been working together with KO GmbH to bring import filters for the MS Office 2007 format. The support added is for the MSOffice 2007 format, which is similar but incompatible to the ISO format 29500.

“The filters will be contributed to the KOffice community very soon, as soon as we can get all the legal clearance done.” says Suresh Chande, the product manager for the Maemo Office suite within Nokia.

The KOffice developer community is positive to this news.

“This is a very encouraging move.” says Inge Wallin, marketing coordinator for KOffice. “The top priority for KOffice will always be the OpenDocument Format, but this will immediately make KOffice viable for new user groups and will also aid migration to ODF based applications for users who currently have documents saved in the MS 2007 formats.”

KOffice is currently in feature freeze before the upcoming release of version 2.1. The MS 2007 filters will be available to end users from version 2.2 which is planned to be released in Q2 2010.

The KOffice team is happy to announce the third beta of the upcoming KOffice 2.1. The plan was originally to release two beta versions followed by a Release Candidate. However, due to the number of outstanding bugs at the time of the second beta it was decided that we would release a third beta version before the first Release Candidate. We simply did not want to release a KOffice 2.1 with too many unsolved bugs.

It is therefore with great pleasure that we look back and see that this extra month has been used very well. The KOffice team has worked overtime and can show a longer list of fixed bugs than ever. See the full changelog for the impressive details.

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The KOffice team is happy to announce the second Beta of the upcoming 2.1 release that implement the KOffice 2 vision. The KOffice community has now switched from adding new features to fixing the remaining bugs. As can be seen in the full changelog the bugfixing is very active in all parts of the suite.

Something that is not obvious from the changelog is that there has been much activity in the MS office import filters, especially for MS Word and Powerpoint. Many new formatting features have been implemented in both these filters.

Coloured Cells in KOffice

This release brings support for viewing tables created in other applications, it also offers editing of cell content.

As was mentioned in the release notes for beta 1, the 2.1 release will contain new features in also most applications, especially KWord, KPresenter and Krita. It also features the come back of the mathematical formula shape.

Since this release includes so many bugfixes, we encourage users that want to help with the process to try it out and report remaining bugs. As usual we are especially interested in bugs that cause data loss or incompatibilities with other office suites such as OpenOffice.org.

Many Linux distributions package KOffice 2.1beta2. Among them are:

• Kubuntu: http://www.kubuntu.org/news/koffice2.1-beta2

If you wish to build KOffice from the source, you can download them at downloads.kde.org. You can find instructions on how to build them on the KOffice wiki..

In a previous blog I mentioned a lot of new features we are working on. With the release of the beta the time for working on new features is over and now we are in full bug fixing frenzy.
A question that recently came up in the KOffice community was when we can honestly say that KOffice is ready for the end user. One answer which I personally like is that features that are present should just work. Fully, and well tested. The project I did in the last week was work on list items. I’ve tried to find all the bugs I could on this topic and make sure they all got fixed for the 2.1 release Naturally this includes writing unit tests to avoid them regressing later. And last I think it is only complete with a blog entry explaining the progress KOffice made.

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The KOffice team is happy to announce the first Beta of the upcoming second release that implement the KOffice 2 vision. This release brings many improvements to the user experience, with bug fixes, improved file support handling, as well as new features.

Coloured Cells in KOffice

This release brings support for viewing tables created in other applications, it also offers editing of cell content.

This release also features the come back of a formula shape, support for filters on shape, and many new painting operation in Krita.

Read the full Changelog.

Its been some months since we released KOffice2.0.0, the first official release for the new platform KOffice2.
For common and certainly for advanced office users we made clear that 2.0 is missing features for them. What then, you may ask, is 2.1 going to change for them?
Well, here is what we are working on and what has been integrated into what will become the 2.1 release in a month or two.

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