The KOffice team is happy to announce the third beta of the upcoming KOffice 2.1. The plan was originally to release two beta versions followed by a Release Candidate. However, due to the number of outstanding bugs at the time of the second beta it was decided that we would release a third beta version before the first Release Candidate. We simply did not want to release a KOffice 2.1 with too many unsolved bugs.

It is therefore with great pleasure that we look back and see that this extra month has been used very well. The KOffice team has worked overtime and can show a longer list of fixed bugs than ever. See the full changelog for the impressive details.

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The KOffice team is happy to announce the second Beta of the upcoming 2.1 release that implement the KOffice 2 vision. The KOffice community has now switched from adding new features to fixing the remaining bugs. As can be seen in the full changelog the bugfixing is very active in all parts of the suite.

Something that is not obvious from the changelog is that there has been much activity in the MS office import filters, especially for MS Word and Powerpoint. Many new formatting features have been implemented in both these filters.

Coloured Cells in KOffice

This release brings support for viewing tables created in other applications, it also offers editing of cell content.

As was mentioned in the release notes for beta 1, the 2.1 release will contain new features in also most applications, especially KWord, KPresenter and Krita. It also features the come back of the mathematical formula shape.

Since this release includes so many bugfixes, we encourage users that 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.

Many Linux distributions package KOffice 2.1beta2. Among them are:

• Kubuntu: http://www.kubuntu.org/news/koffice2.1-beta2

If you wish to build KOffice from the source, you can download them at downloads.kde.org. You can find instructions on how to build them on the KOffice wiki..