• Able to now properly open LibreOffice documents
• A fix to the  loss of docker visibility when closing an application on the startup.

• Krita now handles really large images, bigger than 50 Mb much better
• Several memory leaks fixed in Kexi.

More details of the 2.3.1 release can be found in the list of changes.
This version of KOffice is translated to no less than 27 languages. A new language for this release is Polish, which was previously not shipped.
Many Linux distributions package KOffice 2.3.1. We know that binary packages are ready for various distributions. If you wish to build KOffice from the sources, you can download them at downloads.kde.org. You can find instructions on how to build them on the KOffice wiki.

• Krita is now ready for professional artist use. This is thanks to the very focused effort by the Krita team after a meeting which resulted in a clear vision and well defined goals. More details are available in Krita 2.3.0 announcement
• A new slide sorter view in KPresenter, which has been greatly missed by some users. There is also a new shape animations feature for KPresenter.
• Improvements of the core engine and plugins in the support of the OpenDocument Format. Especially text rendering has seen much work.
• Even more improved support for reading Microsoft file formats (doc, xls, ppt, docx, xlsx, pptx).
• A new report engine used in KPlato and Kexi.

KPresenter slide sorter view

A more comprehensive list of improvements is available in the full list of changes.

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 for end users. 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 (see above). 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 tree view 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 free-form 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 2.3.0 can be downloaded from download.kde.org. Binary packages of KOffice 2.3.0 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 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.

Releases

FreOffice was released and anyone with an N900 can easily install it — and then has access to a very impressive mobile office suite. It’s the only free software (or open source) mobile office suite. It’s the only mobile office suite that is OpenDocument-based, but it still has filters that provide import capabilities for Microsoft Office files. It provides document creation and editing as well as viewing with a user interface optimized for mobile devices. And there are plenty of fun features, like moving between slides using the accelerometer, virtual keyboard support for Indic languages:

And a host of other incredible cool features — if you have an N900, you have to give it a try!

KOffice 2.2.2 was released, the last version of KOffice 2.2. It contains a number of nice bug fixes and is pretty stable, but don’t let yourself be seduced into using 2.2 instead of the 2.3 alphas and betas that we will soon be releasing: we need you to help us test 2.2!

Looking at the work done since 2.2, it’s clear that KOffice 2.3 will be a really cool and solid release, with especially an incredible amount of improvement to the import filters and ODF compatibility but also to text layout, animations in KPresenter, a new mind-mapping shape and much more. Soon, we will open a branch for continued feature development — life never stops — but almost all our effort is now focussed on fixing bugs and getting rid of release blockers.

OOocon

Inge Wallin, Jos van den Oever and Suresh Chande attended the OpenOffice.org conference in Budapest and . Inge sent a detailed report to the KOffice developers mailing list.. Short version: it was a blast. We did quite well, and especially the RDF demo in FreOffice was a big success. To quote Inge:

I and Suresh Chande from Nokia gave a presentation about semantic metadata in ODF, stored in RDF triples. … We also showed a demonstration where a document was
loaded into KWord and we added a vcard (name, telephone number, …) to the
document and then saved it to a file. The file was then transferred to
Suresh’ N900 mobile phone where he showed it using FreOffice and then picked
up the vcard and the telephone number and placed a call to my mobile phone
withing dialling any number. This drew a few raised eyebrows.

Read more about the demo on the FreOffice blog!. FreOffice even made the Hungarian national television.

Inge and Jos also participated in the interoperability demo, where KOffice did much better than at previous sessions.

Development

Andreas Hartmetz has made it possible to link KOffice with the gold linker — which is potentially significant news for the KOffice hackers, since linking KOffice takes almost more time than compiling it, and gold should be much faster.

Boudewijn Rempt implemented a QGraphicsItem-based canvas for KPresenter and Kivio, now the “Big Three” all can render in a QGraphicsView-based system.

Christoph Goehrlich gave a lot of love to the spell checking plugin of KOffice, and now it’s possible to enable and disable the red squiggles and there’s a context menu where you can select alternatives.

Cyril Oblikov put the final touches to the treeshape plugin; loading, saving and configuration is now implemented. This was a Google Summer of Code project, but we are very glad that Cyril has indicated he intends to stay around and keep working on KOffice!

Gopalakrishna Bhat added editing and searching to the spreadsheet module of FreOffice

Jean-Nicholas Artaud added a slide sorter to Kpresenter

Jos van den Oever improved the loading performance of KOffice across the board.

Lassi Taneli Nieminen, Carlos Licea and Sebastian Sauer worked together on the DOCX import filters, especially the PPTX filter and improved those a lot.

Marijn Kruisselbrink not ony got himself engaged during his stay in California, but also doubled the loading speed of KSpread, started an XLS export filter plugin and experimented with directly importing XLS to KSpread — all KOffice applications except Krita always first write out the converted file as ODF and then load it, and this bring a significant peformance with it.

Pramod Soganegopalkrishnabhatt implemented a new HTML export filter for KWord.

Rahul Das implemented OpenGL based slide transitions for the presentation part of FreOffice.

Sugnan Prabhu implemented two very impressive features: the first is an implementation digital signatures for ODF files:

The other new feature is RDF support in FreOffice. This was demoed to great acclaim in Budapest at OOocon. This video is well worth watching! You can load a document in FreOffice, select a name and then proceed to make your N900 call that person.

Of course, there were many more commits by many more people, adding stuff, fixing bugs, improving performance or just the looks of the code — this was just a short tour of the highlights of August

Many Linux distributions package KOffice 2.2.2. We know that binary packages are ready for various distributions. If you wish to build KOffice from the sources, you can download them at downloads.kde.org. You can find instructions on how to build them on the KOffice wiki.