KOffice 2.2 Released

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The KOffice team is very happy to announce version 2.2.0, half a year after the release of KOffice 2.1. This release brings an unprecedented number of new features and bugfixes as can be seen in the full list of changes. There are two reasons for this very high development rate: People have started to notice KOffice again and the developer community is growing and the fact that Nokia is sponsoring development of KOffice for their office viewer. Here follows a list of the most important changes in this release.

Highlights of KOffice 2.2

Kexi is Back

The big news for this release is that Kexi, the data management application, is back. Kexi was last released in KOffice 1.6 and has seen a complete overhaul of the user interface. This means that Kexi has seen over 3 years of developement. Kexi should be ready for production work already.

Major Enhancements

The biggest enhancement that is available for all applications is a new framework for effects on shapes. From the start there are 11 effects. More effects will come in future releases.

New Import Filters for MS OOXML Formats

KOffice has received new import filters for the Microsoft XML based office formats that are used in MS Office 2007 and later. The filters are still pretty basic, but definitely usable for real documents. At this time there are no plans for export filters for these file formats.
Improvement in the Applications

All Applications

We have improved compatibility with non-X11 platforms like Windows and OSX. There are also many performance improvements and improvements to OpenDocument handling. For the developers and integrators there has been a cleanup of the libraries and API’s.

KWord

KWord can now load and show many new formatting features. Spell checking works again. Change tracking has been improved and there is now a dialog for accepting or rejecting changes. The support for metadata using RDF has been brought up to OpenDocument 1.2 level. The import filter for the Microsoft doc format has been much improved and there is a new docx import filter.

KSpread

KSpread, the spreadsheet application, has received a lot of work. Among the changes are a number of new functions, an improved default layout, rich text in cells. The import filter for Microsoft Excel has been much improved and there is a new import filter for the MS Office 2007 format xlsx.

KPresenter

The biggest improvement in KPresenter, the presentation application, is the new shape animation framework. There is also an improved support for Xinerama setups. Like the other productivity applications, KPresenter has received much work on the import filter for MS Powerpoint, and there is a new import filter for the xml based format pptx.

Karbon

Karbon has gotten better compatibility with SVG, the Scalable Vector Graphics format. There is also new effect filters for shapes. Most of the improvements to Karbon has gone into the common components and libraries and are therefore available to all KOffice applications.

Krita

Krita has received the most changes of all. There are a number of new brush engines, a new brush settings preset system,a new core image handling system and a quick-acces popup palette for recently used colors and brushes. There are also new file filters for xcf, jpeg2000 and OpenEXR.

As mentioned above, Kexi is back in KOffice. The biggest changes against the old 1.6 version is that there is a new user interface and a new reporting framework. This reporting framework is also used in KPlato.

KPlato

KPlato has received a new project scheduler and improved reporting using KoReport (shared with Kexi).
Improvements in Plugins

The charts have received many bugfixes.

There are two new shape plugins: one for vector images, currently supporting WMF and EMF formats, and one for embedded videos.

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