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KDE Project Releases New Set Of Linux Office Applications

The KDE Project will release on Tuesday, January 27th, the new 1.3 version of KOffice for Linux and Unix operating systems. KOffice is a free set of office applications that integrate with the award winning KDE desktop.

January 27 2004--The KDE Project will release on tuesday, january 27th, the new 1.3 version of KOffice for Linux and Unix operating systems. KOffice is a free set of office applications that integrate with the award winning KDE desktop. KOffice is a light-weight yet feature rich office solution and provides a variety of filters to interoperate with other popular office suites such as OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office.

KOffice 1.3 consists of the following applications:

KWord - A frame-based word processor.
KSpread - An advanced spreadsheet application.
KPresenter - A full-featured presentation program.
Kivio - A Visio®-style flowcharting application.
Karbon14 - A vector drawing application.
Kugar - A tool for generating business quality reports.
KChart - An integrated graph and chart drawing tool.
KFormula - A powerful formula editor.

Big improvements have been made in KOffice 1.3 with respect to interoperability with other office file formats. It is now for example possible to import as well as export OpenOffice.org documents. Also new is the ability to import PDF files into KWord and make changes to the document. Support for Microsoft document-formats has improved as well.

"Many people have been asking for improved support for the Microsoft document-formats and we have made significant improvements in that area for this release," says David Faure, a KOffice developer for Klarälvdalens Datakonsult AB. "Especially the support for Microsoft Word 95 and Microsoft Word 97 documents has become much better."

A KOffice version for Apple's MacOS X is planned for later this year. "KDE as well as KOffice is built on the cross-platform Qt toolkit," explains Waldo Bastian, a KDE developer for SUSE LINUX, "now that a free version of Qt has been released for MacOS X it has become very straightforward to make a MacOS X version of KOffice as well. I expect that more software vendors will soon follow a similar approach because it is a great way to expand the market for software products with very little effort."