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.

One of the reasons for this fast progress is that the community has received help from two new players: Nokia, who will use KOffice in its next generation of smartphones, and KO GmbH who work exclusively with KOffice and OpenDocument.

The two applications that have received the most bugfixes are KWord and Krita. KWord has seen numerous improvements in many places, and the Microsoft Word filter has once again been improved. However, the .doc filter depends on a version of the wv2 library which should have been released at this time, but so far has not. We expect this new version of wv2 to be released any day, but even for now the .doc filters for KWord can be used by downloading the current source for wv2 and installing.

Krita and Karbon are two of the most mature of the KOffice applications right now. We would especially want to urge users to try out these two applications and give feedback to the community. This can be in the form of bug reports, or using the new Krita forum on forum.kde.org. As an example of work done using Krita, we want to highlight the following picture by Elián Hanisch (m4v on IRC):

"Gentlebot" by Elián Hanisch

Please note, though, that most of the work that has gone into Krita at this time has been corrections of errors. Krita still suffers from bad performance in some places, especially for large images.

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. This time we expect there to be few, so we are increasingly interested in finding them before the release candidate.

Many Linux distributions will have packages of KOffice 2.1beta3. If you wish to build KOffice from the source, you can download it from download.kde.org. You can find instructions on how to build them on the KOffice wiki.

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..