KOffice 2.0 Beta 2 Release Announcement

October, 2008 (The INTERNET). The KDE Project today announced the release of KOffice version 2.0 Beta 2, the second beta version of the upcoming version 2.0.

The KOffice team releases a second beta version today, in line with the monthly releases leading up to the 2.0 final release of the innovative office suite KOffice2.

Over the last few years, the KOffice team has reworked the framework into an agile and flexible codebase. Our intention was to increase integration between the components of KOffice, decreasing duplication of functionality and easing maintenance and development of new features. Furthermore, new approaches to UI design and interacting with the user have been implemented to support the new capabilities.

The goal for the second beta is to show progress made since beta1, as well as to gather feedback from both users and developers on the new UI and underlying infrastructure. This will allow us to release a basically usable 2.0 release, demonstrating our vision for the future of the Digital Office to a larger audience and attract new contributions both in terms of code and ideas for improvements.

KOffice is in beta because the development team wants to receive feedback and bugreports from actual users. Since the last beta release a significant set of issues and speedups-fixes have been integrated for all applications and this release shows the shift of focus from new features to bug fixes until 2.0 is released.

The release team has decided that the following applications are mature enough to be part of 2.0:

The chart application KChart is available as a shape plugin, which means that charts are available in all the KOffice applications in an integrated manner.

Highlights of KOffice 2.0

KOffice 2 will be a much more flexible application suite than KOffice 1 ever was. The integration between the components is much stronger, with the revolutionary Flake Shapes as the central concept. A Flake Shape can be as simple as a square or a circle or as complex as a chart or a music score.

With Flake, any KOffice application can handle any shape. For instance, KWord can embed bitmap graphics, Krita can embed vector graphics and Karbon can embed charts. This flexibility does not only give KOffice unprecedented integration, but also allows new applications to be created very easily. Such applications can e.g. target special user groups like kids or certain professions.

Unified Look and Feel

All the applications of KOffice has a new GUI layout better suited to todays wider screens. The GUI consists of a workspace and a sidebar where tools can dock. Any tool can be ripped off to create its own window and later be redocked fo full flexibility. The users setup preferences are of course saved and reused the next time that KOffice is started.

Download the resulting PDF. The elephant was made by lemmling.

Platform Independence

All of KOffice is available on Linux with KDE or GNOME, Windows and Macintosh. Solaris will follow shortly and we expect builds for other Unix versions to become available soon after the final release.

Since KOffice builds on Qt and the KDE libraries, all applications integrate well with the respective platforms and will take on the native look and feel.

Native Support for OpenDocument

The OASIS OpenDocument Format (ODF) is the ISO standard for office document interchange. ODF has been selected as the national standard for many countries around the world, and continues to grow stronger every month.

KOffice uses the OpenDocument Format as its native format. This will guarantee interoperation with many other Office packages such as OpenOffice.org and MS Office. The KOffice team has representatives on the OASIS technical committee for ODF and has been a strong participant in the process of shaping ODF since its inception.

More Information

More information about new KOffice2 technology can be found in the changelog and earlier announcements or in the release notes.

Bug Reports and User Feedback

From this release, the developers are very interested in user feedback and bug reports. Please report bugs that you find on the KDE bugzilla bugs.kde.org. In particular, the KOffice Team is interested in bugs in the following areas:

• OpenDocument support
• Crashes
• Errors on non-Unix platforms since most developers run Linux and may overlook these.

About KOffice

KOffice is an integrated office suite built on the KDE platform, and utilizes free and open standards like OpenDocument for its document formats, component communication and component embedding.

This release includes:

• a frame-based, full-featured word processor (KWord);
• a spreadsheet application (KSpread);
• a presentation application (KPresenter);
• a new project management application (KPlato).
• a pixel based image editing and paint application (Krita);
• a vector-drawing application (Karbon14).

KOffice and all its components (including KDE) are available for free under Open Source licenses from the KDE http and ftp mirrors.

Announcement: Written by Thomas Zander & Inge Wallin

Trademarks Notices. KDE, K Desktop Environment and KOffice are trademarks of KDE e.V. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. Qt is a trademark of Nokia UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group. All other trademarks and copyrights referred to in this announcement are the property of their respective owners.

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