The advantages of the clean and well-structured codebase have started to show. Despite a relatively limited developer group, there are a large number of improvements over 2.0. During the development of 2.1, it was also announced that KOffice is going to be used in the Nokia n900 smartphones based on Maemo Linux.

The State of KOffice 2.1

This release is a marked improvement of almost all parts of KOffice compared to 2.0. Version 2.0 was labeled a “platform release”, which was meant as a first preview of the framework and new UI paradigm. In version 2.1, most applications and components have improved significantly but should still only be used by early adopters and probably not as the primary worktool.

The exceptions are the graphics applications: Krita, the picture editor / paint application, and Karbon, the vector editor application. Nuno Pinheiro, the designer of the Oxygen KDE theme and icon set says: “I have tested Karbon and it is definitely usable for real work even if lacks a few advanced SVG features“. What Krita is capable of can be seen at the Gallery in the Krita forums.

Karbon 2.1 editing the oxygen Webcam icon

Targeted Audience

Our goal for this release is to show the public the current state of KOffice and create a platform for further improvements. This release is mainly aimed at developers, testers and early adopters. It is not aimed at end users, and we do not recommend Linux distributions to package it as the default office suite yet.

It is noteworthy that KOffice 2.1 still does not have all the features that KOffice 1.6 had, even if it in some ways greatly exceeds KOffice 1.6. These features will return in the upcoming version  2.2, in most cases better implemented and more efficient. Also, not all applications which were part of KOffice 1.6 made it into KOffice 2.1. The missing applications will return in 2.2 or possibly 2.3.

Applications and Components

The following applications and plugins are part of KOffice 2.1:

General

All parts of KOffice, including the underlying libraries have received many bugfixes and improvements. Special attention has been paid to support for the OpenDocument Format, ODF. One example of that is handling of lists. To ensure the quality of the ODF implementation, the KOffice team has participated in ODF interoperability tests called the ODF Plugfest. For a more detailed list, refer to the announcements and changelogs for the alpha and beta versions of KOffice 2.1.

KWord – Word processor

KWord has a new implementation of tables. The tables are more advanced than the ones in version 1.6: They can be larger than one page and support nested tables in tables and they support a number of formatting properties. The drawback is that the table contents can be edited, but the tables themselves will only become editable in the next version.

Another large new feature in KWord is change tracking. Changes in the document can be tracked and are displayed color coded. Insertions, deletions and formatting changes have different colors. Still lacking is a dialog to select individual changes and make them permanent.

KSpread – Spreadsheet calculator

There are no big new features in KSpread, but a fair number of bugfixes.

KPresenter – Presentation manager

KPresenter has a few new features and many bug fixes. Some of the new features are an infinite canvas and slide numbers.

KPlato – Project management software

KPlato has been improved a lot, and has support for many different manipulations of resources, currencies and work types.  It also has support for offline work using a small utility called KPlatoWork. KPlato was featured in the release announcement for KOffice 2.1 RC1.

Karbon – Vector graphics editor

Karbon 2.1 has a new framework for svg filter effect plugins.  There are also a few filters implemented: offset, blur and merge.  These can be combined to create a drop shadow effect.

Also new in 2.1 is an import filter for PDF files.

Krita – Raster graphics editor

Krita has new brushes: among them a spray brush, a deform brush and a 3D visualization of brushes. It also has a new infinite canvas feature and a dyna tool that can simulate a pressure sensitive input device by using the speed of the mouse.

Plugins

The Chart plugin (or so called shape) has received a number of bugfixes but no new features.

The Formula shape is now back in KOffice 2.1 after being absent in 2.0.  It is not very advanced at the moment.

The Picture shape has seen many optimizations.

Import and Export

Import and export of foreign file formats have been given an overhaul, and especially the import filters for Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt) and Word (.doc) have been much improved. This is a result of the work done for the Nokia n900 Office viewers.

The desktop database creator Kexi was scheduled for inclusion in 2.1, but has not been finished. Right now we hope to be able to release it in version 2.2. Kivio, the flowchart editor, is currently without maintainer and it is not certain when or if it will be released.

Highlights of KOffice 2

KOffice 2 is 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.

Karbon - Tiger

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 for full flexibility. The tool layout is of course saved and reused the next time that KOffice is started.

Platform Independence

KOffice is available on Linux (with any desktop), Windows and Macintosh. Solaris will follow shortly and we expect builds for other Unix versions to become available soon after the final release. It is possible that the release of binaries for Windows and Macintosh will occur after some time if other packages that KOffice depend on need more time.

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.

Krita 2 runs on Mac OS X

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 interoperability 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.

Bug Reports and User Feedback

The developers are very interested in user feedback and bug reports. Please report bugs that you find at 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.

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.

Press Contacts

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.

One of the applications that we have not talked much about so far is KPlato. KPlato is short for the K Planning Tool, and is an application for project management. It was released as technology preview in 2.0, but in 2.1 we believe it to be usable for smaller projects and for early adopters. We expect that KPlato will bring KOffice to new categories of users who need our unique cross platform project management application.

KPlato quick introduction and tutorial

KPlato has features including graphical and list based task dependency editor, task status view, and a schedules view. It can also calculate and display performance indexes, etc for earned value management. It has support for scripting via the common KOffice scripting interface and a number of scripts are provided with the application. It comes with a tutorial to introduce new users to the concepts.

KPlato has support for external workflow by issuing work packages that can be issued to project members. These people can use a separate utility called KPlatoWork to report back to the main project. Last but not least, KPlato can export to the iCalendar format so that it integrates with many applications, including Kontact, the KDE personal information manager.

KPlato dependencies view

Please try out KPlato and tell us what you think at the KOffice forums. There is still time to fix the last few bugs, and all feature requests will be used as input for the next versions.

This is the last release before the final release of KOffice 2.1. We ask all our users who 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 real release.

Many Linux distributions will have packages of KOffice 2.1RC1. 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.

Update about Kexi:
Although Kexi is continuously developed, we don’t manage to deliver the final version of the application on time. It is scheduled for KOffice 2.2. Users are encouraged to stay with 1.1.x series if possible.

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..