Sources and Binary Packages

The source code to KOffice 2.3 RC1 can be downloaded from download.kde.org. Binary packages will be available and announced separately as soon as the respective distribution provides them.

Sources and Binary Packages

The source code to KOffice 2.3 beta 4 can be downloaded from download.kde.org. Binary packages will be available and announced separately as soon as the respective distribution provides them.

Sources and Binary Packages

The source code to KOffice 2.3 beta 3 can be downloaded from download.kde.org. Binary packages will be available and announced separately as soon as the respective distribution provides them.

Between 2.3 beta 1 and 2.3 beta 2 there have been 597 commits by 28 different authors.

• All applications have received bug fixes and improvements.  Krita is the application with the biggest team behind it and therefore also the most active one.
• Embedded formulas have had a general shapeup and now loads much larger parts of the mathML specification
• The import filters for Microsoft formats continue to be improved at a furious rate.  We are now starting to see cases where the look of a document in KOffice is better than in any other free office suite.

Sources and Binary Packages

The source code to KOffice 2.3 beta 2 can be downloaded from download.kde.org. Binary packages will be available and announced separately as soon as the respective distribution provides them.

• Krita is now more or less ready for professional artist use. Some bugs remain in the beta, but those are expected to be gone in the real release.
• “text on shapes” which is available for all KOffice applications and makes KOffice able to show text on all shapes that are able to do that in the OpenDocument specification.
• The slide sorter view in KPresenter, which has been greatly missed by some users. There is also a new shape animations feature for KPresenter.

The new beta also offers many new features and improvements, bug fixes, and improved support for reading Microsoft file formats (doc, xls, ppt, docx, xlsx, pptx).

Showing off various brushes in Krita: chalk, deform, hairy, smudge and spray. Also showing general readiness for artist use.

The 2.3 beta1 release of KOffice gives you a preview of what will be new and improved when the final 2.3 version is released in November. As you can see in the list of changes, there are many improvements.

Readiness for End Users and External Developers

There have been a number of improvements, especially to libraries and plugins, which have resulted in most of the OpenDocument standard now being covered for loading, rendering and saving. , which in itself is a big step forward. The most mature productivity application right now is KSpread, which we are willing to recommend for end user production work.

However, for the two other productivity applications KWord and KPresenter, the user interface does still not reach the level of quality that the team wants to achieve. The applications should be stable enough for real use, but there are still many formatting options that cannot be handled through the user interface. For more information about ideas towards this goal for KWord, see our Personas page.

There is also some good news: During the development cycle for version 2.3, we have had the good fortune to get a usability expert, Thomas Pfeiffer, to donate his time and skill. We expect that this will bear fruit for the 2.4 release.

Regarding the creativity applications, the most mature application of KOffice right now is Krita. There are still some bugs in this beta release, but we expect that at the time for the real release of 2.3, Krita will be usable by real artists for their professional needs. Karbon was also already usable in 2.2, and has remained so.

Readiness of Kexi for production work depends on the needs of the users application. It is recommended to test the feature set of Kexi against specific needs. Since version 2.2, which was the first release in the KOffice 2 family, Kexi has improved mostly in terms of stability. There are a number of features from versions 1.x of Kexi that are not present in 2.x releases yet, but which are either planned for addition or are discontinued. For example, forms may need manual rework because of missing Auto Fields.

Sponsored Development and OpenDocument Community Work

Like 2.2, release 2.3 has seen significant contributions in development from external companies and organizations. Nokia has sponsored much work on the general improvements and the converters for importing MS file formats for their Maemo office viewers. KO GmbH as well as NLnet have sent participants to the ODF plugfest and OpenOffice.org conference in Budapest, Hungary.

As usual, Google has arranged the Google Summer of Code programme. This year, KOffice had 6 projects of which 5 are in this release:

• Benjamin Port worked on shape animations for KPresenter.
• Cyril Oblikov worked on the treeview shape that is mentioned in the changelog, but still considered experimental.
• Adam Celarek worked on next-generation color selectors for Krita.
• Marc Pegon made a new transform tool with freeform warping for Krita.
• Dmitry Kazakov created canvas mirror/rotation and a new multi-threaded rendering engine for Krita.
• José Luis Vergara Tolosa made a hatching brush, a bumpmap filter, and the beginning of an impasto feature, also for Krita.

Sources and Binary Packages

The source code to KOffice 2.3 beta 1 can be downloaded from download.kde.org. Binary packages of KOffice 2.3 beta1 will be available and announced separately as soon as the respective distribution provides them.

As usual, this release offers many improvements and bug fixes, as can be seen in the list of changes. Most of the reported bugs on the so called “release blocker list” have been fixed. The rest will be fixed before the final release. A release blocker is a bug that is either a crash that prevents the user to use the application or a bug that leads to unacceptable data loss. They are marked with a special keyword in the bug database. A regression within the unit test suite can also be regarded as a release blocker.

A more thorough description of what is new in KOffice 2.2 in relation to version 2.1 can be seen in the announcement for version 2.2 beta 1.

Readiness for End Users and External Developers

As also mentioned in the 2.2 beta 1 announcement, the KOffice team had hoped to have time to make the user interface and available feature set ready for end users as well as make the underlying engine ready for external extension developers in time for 2.2. Unfortunately time and limited developer resources didn’t permit to reach both of these goals. The libraries have been reorganized and improved, but the user interface does still not reach the level of quality that the team wants to achieve.

Notable exceptions to this are Krita, that has seen much work on the user interface and Karbon that was already usable before.

Sources and Binary Packages

The source code to KOffice 2.2 RC can be downloaded from download.kde.org. Binary packages of KOffice 2.2 RC will be available and announced separately as soon as the respective distribution provides them.

A more thorough description of what is new in KOffice 2.2 in relation to version 2.1 can be seen in the announcement for version 2.2 beta 1.

Readiness for End Users and External Developers

As also mentioned in the 2.2 beta 1 announcement, the KOffice team had hoped to have time to make the user interface and available feature set ready for end users as well as make the underlying engine ready for external extension developers in time for 2.2. Unfortunately time and limited developer resources didn’t permit to reach both of these goals. The libraries have been reorganized and improved, but the user interface does still not reach the level of quality that the team wants to achieve.

Notable exceptions to this are Krita, that has seen much work on the user interface and Karbon that was already usable before.

Sources and Binary Packages

The source code to KOffice 2.2 beta 2 can be downloaded from download.kde.org. Binary packages of KOffice 2.2beta 2 will be available and announced separately as soon as the respective distribution provides them.

Kexi 2.2 - Form Designer

The 2.2beta1 release of KOffice gives you a preview of what will be new and improved when the final 2.2 version is released in May. As you can see in the list of changes, there are many new features and an old application from KOffice 1 has made a reappearance: Kexi, the data manager in the style of MS Access. Another completely new feature is import filters for the MS OOXML formats, introduced in MS Office 2007.

Readiness for End Users and External Developers

The KOffice team had hoped to have time to make the user interface and available feature set ready for end users as well as make the underlying engine ready for external extension developers in time for 2.2. Unfortunately time and limited developer resources didn’t permit to reach both of these goals. The libraries have been reorganized and improved, but the user interface does still not reach the level of quality that the team wants to achieve.

Notable exceptions to this are Krita, that has seen much work on the user interface and Karbon that was already usable before.

Sponsored Development and OpenDocument Community Work

Release 2.2 will be the first release where external companies and organizations made significant contributions in development. Nokia has sponsored much work on the general improvements and the converters for importing MS file formats for their Maemo office viewers. NLnet has sponsored the work on RDF metadata and change tracking. KO GmbH as well as NLnet have sent participants to the ODF plugfest and OpenOffice.org conference in Orvieto, Italy.

Sources and Binary Packages

The source code to KOffice 2.2 beta 1 can be downloaded from download.kde.org. Binary packages of KOffice 2.2beta1 will be available and announced separately as soon as the respective distribution provides them.

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.