KOffice 2.0 released for early adopters

The KOffice developers have announced the release of KOffice 2.0, the open source, QT4 and KDE based office package. KOffice 2.0 is composed of the KWord word processor, KSpread spread sheet, KPresenter presentation manager, KPlato project management, Karbon vector graphics editor and Krita, a raster graphics editor. One major feature of KOffice 2 is the concept of Flake Shapes, which allow for arbitrary shapes to be integrated into documents. For example, KChart is available as a shape plug-in which makes charts available in all the KOffice applications.

The desktop database application Kexi and the shape plug-in for formulas are not included in 2.0, but are scheduled to appear with KOffice 2.1. KOffice 2.0 runs on Linux with a KDE or GNOME desktop, or on Windows or Macintosh. A Solaris version is expected shortly. KOffice 2.0 uses ODF (Open Document Format) as its native file format, to ensure document compatibility with OpenOffice.org and MS Office.

However, the developers say KOffice 2.0 is a preview and that it should not be packaged with Linux distributions, or used in production. They are looking for early adopters, testers and developers, and point out that KOffice 2.0 does not have all the features of KOffice 1.6; they plan to remedy that in versions 2.1 and 2.2. The plan is to release three maintenance versions, approximately one a month, for the 2.0 version and then release 2.1 with new features in October.

Packaged binary versions of KOffice 2.0 are available to download, for Ubuntu, Gentoo and openSUSE.

(djwm)