KOffice 2.3.3 was released in March, and because its a stable release, it contains no new features; regardless, it features new bug fixes including:
The KOffice team is happy to release KOffice 2.3.1, the first bugfix release in the 2.3 series. This release contains no new features but a number of bug fixes for some of the components in KOffice 2.3.
Among the important changes are:
More details of the 2.3.1 release can be found in the list of changes.
This version of KOffice is translated to no less than 27 languages. A new language for this release is Polish, which was previously not shipped.
Many Linux distributions package KOffice 2.3.1. We know that binary packages are ready for various distributions. If you wish to build KOffice from the sources, you can download them at downloads.kde.org. You can find instructions on how to build them on the KOffice wiki.
The KOffice team is happy to announce the 2.3 release of KOffice. This release brings many small improvements to all the KOffice applications, but not as many large new features. Among the most important new features are:
KPresenter slide sorter view
A more comprehensive list of improvements is available in the full list of changes.
There have been a number of improvements, especially to libraries and plugins which have resulted in most of the OpenDocument standard now being covered for: loading, rendering and saving, which in itself is a big step forward. The most mature productivity application right now is KSpread, which we are willing to recommend for end user production work.
However, for the two other productivity applications KWord and KPresenter, the user interface does still not reach the level of quality that the team wants to achieve for end users. The applications should be stable enough for real use, but there are still many formatting options that cannot be handled through the user interface. For more information about ideas towards this goal for KWord, see our Personas page.
There is also some good news: During the development cycle for version 2.3, we have had the good fortune to get a usability expert, Thomas Pfeiffer, to donate his time and skill. We expect that this will bear fruit for the 2.4 release.
Regarding the creativity applications, the most mature application of KOffice right now is Krita (see above). Karbon was also already usable in 2.2, and has remained so.
Readiness of Kexi for production work depends on the needs of the users application. It is recommended to test the feature set of Kexi against specific needs. Since version 2.2, which was the first release in the KOffice 2 family, Kexi has improved mostly in terms of stability. There are a number of features from versions 1.x of Kexi that are not present in 2.x releases yet, but which are either planned for addition or are discontinued. For example, forms may need manual rework because of missing Auto Fields.
Like 2.2, release 2.3 has seen significant contributions in development from external companies and organizations. Nokia has sponsored much work on the general improvements and the converters for importing MS file formats for their Maemo office viewers. KO GmbH as well as NLnet have sent participants to the ODF plugfest and OpenOffice.org conference in Budapest, Hungary.
As usual, Google has arranged the Google Summer of Code programme. This year, KOffice had 6 projects of which 5 are in this release:
KPresenter (Calligra Stage) animation from Calligra Suite on Vimeo.
The source code to KOffice 2.3.0 can be downloaded from download.kde.org. Binary packages of KOffice 2.3.0 will be available and announced separately as soon as the respective distribution provides them.
The KOffice team is happy to announce the first release candidate of the upcoming 2.3 release of KOffice. This release only adds bugfixes from the previous beta version.
With only a couple of release blockers, the final version is very close.
Between 2.3 beta 4 and 2.3 RC 1 there have been 229 commits by 26 different authors.
All applications have received bug fixes and improvements. Krita is the application with the biggest team behind it and therefore also the most active one, and the team is aiming at making an almost perfect release.
The import filters for Microsoft formats continue to be improved at a furious rate. We are now starting to see cases where the look of a document in KOffice is better than in any other free office suite.
The source code to KOffice 2.3 RC1 can be downloaded from download.kde.org. Binary packages will be available and announced separately as soon as the respective distribution provides them.
The KOffice team is happy to announce the fourth, and last, beta of the upcoming 2.3 release of KOffice. This release only adds bugfixes from the second beta version.
Between 2.3 beta 3 and 2.3 beta 4 there have been 239 commits by 25 different authors.
All applications have received bug fixes and improvements. Krita is the application with the biggest team behind it and therefore also the most active one.
The import filters for Microsoft formats continue to be improved at a furious rate. We are now starting to see cases where the look of a document in KOffice is better than in any other free office suite.
The source code to KOffice 2.3 beta 4 can be downloaded from download.kde.org. Binary packages will be available and announced separately as soon as the respective distribution provides them.
The KOffice team is happy to announce the third beta of the upcoming 2.3 release of KOffice. This release only adds bugfixes from the second beta version.
Between 2.3 beta 2 and 2.3 beta 3 there have been 443 commits by 29 different authors.
All applications have received bug fixes and improvements. Krita is the application with the biggest team behind it and therefore also the most active one.
The import filters for Microsoft formats continue to be improved at a furious rate. We are now starting to see cases where the look of a document in KOffice is better than in any other free office suite. However, further betas are still needed to improve the quality of this release.
The source code to KOffice 2.3 beta 3 can be downloaded from download.kde.org. Binary packages will be available and announced separately as soon as the respective distribution provides them.
The KOffice team is happy to announce the second beta of the upcoming 2.3 release of KOffice. This release only adds bugfixes from the first beta version. As you can see in the list of changes, the developers have been far from idle.
Between 2.3 beta 1 and 2.3 beta 2 there have been 597 commits by 28 different authors.
The source code to KOffice 2.3 beta 2 can be downloaded from download.kde.org. Binary packages will be available and announced separately as soon as the respective distribution provides them.
The KOffice team is happy to announce the first beta of the upcoming 2.3 release of KOffice. This release brings many small improvements to all the KOffice applications, but not as many large new features. The most important new features being:
It’s been some time since the last update — about 650 commits, in fact, over a period of four weeks. sometimes real life issues get in the way of producing timely updates, and now there have been so many commits that I’m not going to try to give you blow-by-blow account of what happened! But there are quite a few highlights! Last week was also the last week new features could be added to KOffice, since we’ve entered the hard freeze period for the 2.3 release. We’ve also seen two people newly come to our community who are working on bringing KOffice places where it never was before: the medical market and Meego, proving KOffice’s incredible versatility.
FreOffice was released and anyone with an N900 can easily install it — and then has access to a very impressive mobile office suite. It’s the only free software (or open source) mobile office suite. It’s the only mobile office suite that is OpenDocument-based, but it still has filters that provide import capabilities for Microsoft Office files. It provides document creation and editing as well as viewing with a user interface optimized for mobile devices. And there are plenty of fun features, like moving between slides using the accelerometer, virtual keyboard support for Indic languages:
And a host of other incredible cool features — if you have an N900, you have to give it a try!
KOffice 2.2.2 was released, the last version of KOffice 2.2. It contains a number of nice bug fixes and is pretty stable, but don’t let yourself be seduced into using 2.2 instead of the 2.3 alphas and betas that we will soon be releasing: we need you to help us test 2.2!
Looking at the work done since 2.2, it’s clear that KOffice 2.3 will be a really cool and solid release, with especially an incredible amount of improvement to the import filters and ODF compatibility but also to text layout, animations in KPresenter, a new mind-mapping shape and much more. Soon, we will open a branch for continued feature development — life never stops — but almost all our effort is now focussed on fixing bugs and getting rid of release blockers.
Inge Wallin, Jos van den Oever and Suresh Chande attended the OpenOffice.org conference in Budapest and . Inge sent a detailed report to the KOffice developers mailing list.. Short version: it was a blast. We did quite well, and especially the RDF demo in FreOffice was a big success. To quote Inge:
I and Suresh Chande from Nokia gave a presentation about semantic metadata in ODF, stored in RDF triples. … We also showed a demonstration where a document was
loaded into KWord and we added a vcard (name, telephone number, …) to the
document and then saved it to a file. The file was then transferred to
Suresh’ N900 mobile phone where he showed it using FreOffice and then picked
up the vcard and the telephone number and placed a call to my mobile phone
withing dialling any number. This drew a few raised eyebrows.
Read more about the demo on the FreOffice blog!. FreOffice even made the Hungarian national television.
Inge and Jos also participated in the interoperability demo, where KOffice did much better than at previous sessions.
Andreas Hartmetz has made it possible to link KOffice with the gold linker — which is potentially significant news for the KOffice hackers, since linking KOffice takes almost more time than compiling it, and gold should be much faster.
Boudewijn Rempt implemented a QGraphicsItem-based canvas for KPresenter and Kivio, now the “Big Three” all can render in a QGraphicsView-based system.
Christoph Goehrlich gave a lot of love to the spell checking plugin of KOffice, and now it’s possible to enable and disable the red squiggles and there’s a context menu where you can select alternatives.
Cyril Oblikov put the final touches to the treeshape plugin; loading, saving and configuration is now implemented. This was a Google Summer of Code project, but we are very glad that Cyril has indicated he intends to stay around and keep working on KOffice!
Gopalakrishna Bhat added editing and searching to the spreadsheet module of FreOffice
Jean-Nicholas Artaud added a slide sorter to Kpresenter
Jos van den Oever improved the loading performance of KOffice across the board.
Lassi Taneli Nieminen, Carlos Licea and Sebastian Sauer worked together on the DOCX import filters, especially the PPTX filter and improved those a lot.
Marijn Kruisselbrink not ony got himself engaged during his stay in California, but also doubled the loading speed of KSpread, started an XLS export filter plugin and experimented with directly importing XLS to KSpread — all KOffice applications except Krita always first write out the converted file as ODF and then load it, and this bring a significant peformance with it.
Pramod Soganegopalkrishnabhatt implemented a new HTML export filter for KWord.
Rahul Das implemented OpenGL based slide transitions for the presentation part of FreOffice.
Sugnan Prabhu implemented two very impressive features: the first is an implementation digital signatures for ODF files:
The other new feature is RDF support in FreOffice. This was demoed to great acclaim in Budapest at OOocon. This video is well worth watching! You can load a document in FreOffice, select a name and then proceed to make your N900 call that person.
Of course, there were many more commits by many more people, adding stuff, fixing bugs, improving performance or just the looks of the code — this was just a short tour of the highlights of August
The KOffice team is happy to release KOffice 2.2.2, the second bugfix release in the 2.2 series. This release contains no new features but a few bug fixes for some of the components in KOffice 2.2. More details of the 2.2.2 release can be found in the changelog. This version of KOffice is translated to no less than 27 languages.
Many Linux distributions package KOffice 2.2.2. We know that binary packages are ready for various distributions. If you wish to build KOffice from the sources, you can download them at downloads.kde.org. You can find instructions on how to build them on the KOffice wiki.
KOffice is free software, meaning it's open for anyone to improve and does not cost anything.
It's created mainly by people in their free time. Why don't you return the favour by helping in any way you see fit: Report bugs, translate into your language, program, donate money, or write a piece for the user manuals.
