KOffice 2.2 released

More than six months after the release of KOffice 2.1, the KOffice developers have announced the release of version 2.2 of their open source office suite. KOffice is composed of the KWord word processor, KSpread spreadsheet, KPresenter presentation manager, KPlato project management, Karbon vector graphics editor and Krita, a raster graphics editor.

The new stable release features the return of the Kexi data manager application, which is modelled after Microsoft Access, and the addition of new import filters for the MS OOXML formats that were introduced in Microsoft Office 2007. Krita graphics editor updates include, for example, GIF import, support for PPM, XFC and JPEG200, and burn and dodge filters.

Library updates include added support for filter effects on group shapes, sections in text and loading / saving path data for connection shapes. Other changes include the return of a spelling checker in KWord, support for presentation variables in KPresenter and improved doc, xls and ppt filters.

According to the developers, KOffice 2.2 contains more than 4,500 changes and is the first release to include a significant number of code contributions from external companies and organisations, noting that mobile phone manufacturer Nokia has "sponsored much work on the general improvements and the converters for importing MS file formats for their Maemo office viewers".

More details about the release can be found in the change log and the release announcment. KOffice 2.2 source code is available to download (direct download) from the project's web site. KOffice is licensed under LGPL 2+ and under the GPL.

(crve)