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.

More details of the 2.0.2 release can be found in the changelog. This version of KOffice is translated to no less than 27 languages.

You can find source and binary packages for 2.0.2 here.

More details of the 2.0.1 release can be found in the changelog. This version of KOffice is translated to no less than 27 languages, one more than 2.0.0. The new language for this release is Norwegian Bokmål, one of the two written forms of Norwegian.

You can find source and binary packages for 2.0.1 here.