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.

KOffice2 is still a fresh set of office tools. We released the 2.0, called platform release, just 3 months ago and work continues to make the suite more stable and to add the minimum set of features people should be able to expect.

All KOffice community members are continuing to do an awesome job with many bugs being closed and lots of love going into all the applications. This means that the 2.1 release will already be much closer to being ready for the big crowds.
We got a little help now too. Nokia has packaged KOffice for Maemo 5 environment with a new UI for Maemo 5!, This means that KOffice can run in the new Maemo device(N900) . Just to clarify, this is not a commercial product of Maemo but is a contribution by Nokia to Open Source. The developed application will be made available for download in a typical release-early release-often. Bugs will likely exist in this version.

This is exciting news as KOffice will be available to a huge audience and Nokia has been helping to fix bugs and make MS-Office document support more robust.

Nokia has created a document viewer for the Maemo 5 platform (Fremantle) based on KOffice and uses the KWord and KPresenter applications to load and display word processor and presentation documents. The application uses a custom user interface specifically designed to fit in with the Maemo 5 style.

Part of the projects goals is to help KOffice mature its loading and rendering of MSOffice documents.

It is important to point out that all contributions to KOffice have been made directly inside the KOffice subversion repository. The KOffice document viewer for Maemo 5 will be shown for the first time at Maemo Summit in Amsterdam between October the 9th and 11th. This release is a bit unfortunately timed as the official KOffice2.1 release will likely be one or two weeks later making the Fremantle office use the release candidate at first.

I think its very exciting to have the hard work of all the KOffice community members be rewarded by having the document reader be based on our hard work. I’m very thankful to be working on the project and I’m looking forward to continued cooperation between Nokia and the KOffice community.

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.