KOffice 1.5 beta 1 Released

The KDE Project today announced the release of KOffice 1.5 beta 1, the first preview release for KOffice 1.5, scheduled for release this March. KOffice is an integrated office suite with more components than any other suite in existence. Never before has a new version of KOffice brought this many exciting new features including Kexi 1.0 and the first release of project management application KPlato. Read the full announcement and the changelog for more details or read on for the full article.

This release specifically introduces the following highlights:

  • OASIS OpenDocument as the Default File Format

    KOffice now uses OASIS OpenDocument as the default file format for the productivity applications KWord, KSpread, and KPresenter. In the final 1.5 release, the charting application KChart will also use OpenDocument as the default format.

  • Enhanced Accessibility for Users with Disabilities

    The decision of the Commonwealth of Massachussetts to base its future document format on open standards started a great debate with many different people and organization taking part. One major aspect is accessibility. KOffice now supports enhanced accessibility through mouseless operation and text-to-speech.

  • Start of a Unified Scripting Approach

    This version of KOffice features a start of a unified scripting solution called Kross. Kross provides cross-language support for scripting (thus its name) and at present supports Python and Ruby.

  • First Major Release of Kexi (1.0)

    KOffice 1.5 contains the much expected final 1.0 version of Kexi, a data
    management application which is the KOffice counterpart to MS Access or
    FileMaker. It is designed from the ground up as a standard KDE database
    application.

  • Project management application KPlato

    KOffice 1.5 is the first official release to include KPlato. KPlato is a project management application that lets the user control project schedules and resource use. It is included in KOffice 1.5 as a technology preview and full functionality is expected for version 2.0.

Of course, it also fixes countless bugs and introduces a lot of smaller new features.

Packages are available for Debian Sarge, Debian Sid, Kubuntu and SuSE.

Throughout the beta period, to make testing easier, the Klik developer team will provide up to date Klik packages for all of KOffice. Klik packages may be used without installation and run on multiple GNU/Linux platforms without disturbing the system's native package manager. See the KOffice Klik wiki page for details of the bundles and supported distributions.

Dot Categories: 

Comments

by klik-er (not verified)

Taskjuggler an engine without a GUI???

Inge Wallin, you are ill-informed then. Just try to convince yourself by quickly running

--> sh $HOME/.klik taskjuggler <--

or

--> klik://taskjuggler <--

What I see here coming up is a GUI, and even a beautiful KDE-ified one (instead of the former web interface TaskJuggler threw against my aestetic feelings.

by Inge Wallin (not verified)

You are right, I was too quick here. Sorry.

The fact still remains, though, that we want the TaskJuggler engine in KPlato :-)

by superstoned (not verified)

sorry, i didn't know kplato might be worked into a TaskJuggler user :D

hope you guys can use parts of the current KDE/Qt TaskJuggler frontend... it is already very complete and looks very usefull (i didn't need a full tool like that, but it seems to be very powerfull)

by klik-er (not verified)

That's great!

Just make sure that you tell the world when a klik://PlatoJuggler is ready so I can add it to my collection of kliks :-)

by Piotr Gawrysiak (not verified)

Sure, there is GUI for displaying the projects' contents, but there is no GUI for editing. In fact, the Taskjuggler docs contain references to this, claiming that due to lack of graphical editing components one can create much bigger projects. But this means that Taskjuggler can not be a real replacement for eg. MS Project - of course IT managers might probably want to learn TJ language, but I do not think that any other project manager would do it :-)

by Aaron J. Seigo (not verified)

hmm.. i've always had the impression that they are two different tools for different types of jobs.

kplato (and ms project, for that matter) are great for small to medium sized projects that are generally fairly linear and need timelining and basic resource management.

taskjuggler and similar software products are designed for large engineering-style projects where you have a lot of resources (people) working on a number of parts of a project simultaneously and where managing the resources is more complex and important than managing the timeline.

timelining versus resource management, that's generally how i find the split. but perhaps that's just me? +)

by Boudewijn Rempt (not verified)

Not entirely just you. I'm not really interested in project management -- but I have used KPlato for planning Krita development to some extent. Of course, what's missing is an uncertainty generator and knowledge of exam periods in a wide variety of countries, but it was admirably suited for my purpose.

Task juggler comes into its own when you've got scores of "resources".

by Christian Loose (not verified)

It's not like KPlato was started yesterday. It already exists since 2001:
http://webcvs.kde.org/koffice/kplato/main.cc?rev=1.18&view=log.

There was just a long pause in its development. ;-)

by aranea (not verified)

Is there one?

by Andreas Mueller (not verified)

there is a first test release which is based on Kubuntu Breezy

You'll find it at:
ftp://ftp.bay13.net/pub/kubuntu-devel/kubuntu351+koffice15b1.iso

Cheers,
amu

by superstoned (not verified)

is that cd german?!?!?

by Ahmed Kamal (not verified)

First of all, a million thanks to all koffice devs. It's stuff like this, that really help Desktop linux become a reality. I can finally drop the turtle that it OOo :)

One thing that I doubt, is whether Koffice uses the *same* import/export filters for the shitty MS document formats as OOo ?

by Robert Knight (not verified)

No it doesn't - the filters are KOffice's own (I'm not entirely sure about the MS Word one though). If you do a lot of work with complex Microsoft Office documents, OpenOffice will be better for you at the moment.

An alternative is to convert them using OpenOffice and then use KOffice to work with them :)

by Cookiem (not verified)

This is simply amazing! Better doc`s and small companies can use it already.

Thanks to all KOffice developers!

by MamiyaOtaru (not verified)

kchart forces you to do some really strange things to display a pie chart. I keep wondering if it will ever change.. have a look at the image:
http://img494.imageshack.us/my.php?image=piechartmess2ev.png

Seems to be getting worse, I don't remember having to leave a blank row before.

by Robert Knight (not verified)

Hi,

I made that change. The first Row is assumed to be column labels (eg. "Month" , "Sales"). The leftmost Column is assumed to be row labels (eg. "January", "February" etc.)

Under KChart 1.4, you had to manually click on the table headers to set up labels for series or rows. This means it was slow because you couldn't do it easily via the keyboard. I also found it non-intuitive, since in spreadsheets etc. the first column and last row are usually used for such labels.

The other thing is that the default data layout has been changed from data in rows to data in columns, ie:

Month | Sales
Jan | X
Feb | Y

Instead of:

Month | Jan | Feb
Sales | X | Y

The rationale is that most tables of data are presented in the first format rather than the second (which is why almost all spreadsheet packages have many more rows than columns), so KChart now expects data in the first format by default.

I will see what I can do to make the KChart Data Editor more intuitive for the final KOffice 1.5 release. Thanks for the feedback.

by Inge Wallin (not verified)

Yes, KChart is a bit messed up in the beta, I'm sorry for that. The reason is that we got a completely new engine just before the beta, and I didn't have time to fix all the other TODOs. I promise you that you will have a easy and intuitive data editor until the final release of 1.5.

Aside from that, a pie chart is not very good to display two-dimensional data. Try the ring chart instead.

by MamiyaOtaru (not verified)

Thank you for your responses. The link is to a pic of the equivalent situation in 1.4. http://img133.imageshack.us/my.php?image=piechart14mess4ps.png

It was nice to have the labels separate from the data, but I see your reasoning for changing it. Having to click on each one could be a bit of a pain. Still, something to separate it from the data itself, a label above it calling it the "label column/row", or maybe the row/column with the labels could be a different color, something.

Ring charts were mentioned. They suffer from the same affliction as pie charts (at least in 1.4, to which I have just temporarily downgraded). At any rate, pie charts remain popular, so I hope both can be fixed. Best of luck, I look forward to the next beta!

by MamiyaOtaru (not verified)

I called kchart 1.5 a horrible regression in the picture in the parent post, sorry for that. I made it straight after downgrading and before checking if there were any responses to my original post. I then read those and it explained what had happened and your reasoning, and I forgot to change the pic. Anyway, keep at it!

by Evan "JabberWok... (not verified)

Any word on when there will be a fixed Kubuntu package for KWord?

(It was compiled with some visual debugging features enabled, which is really neat to look at, but kind of makes it less useful).

by klik-er (not verified)

Try

klik://kword-1.5-beta

Works really well, also on Kubuntu (and gets updated every few days, even without an official beta. The current version has fixes from SVN for bugs that were only discovered after the first Beta was released).

by Evan "JabberWok... (not verified)

I use KWord in an office environment. I don't want to test it other than to see if the beta was stable enough for actual use... a nice weekend project.

It wasn't, so I reverted back to the stable version and will wait until it's RC to try again.

Thanks, though.

by Kurt Pfeifle (not verified)

Are you aware that klik (http://klik.atekon.de/) enables you to use the Beta (and upcoming RC) without the need to de-install the stable version?

Give it a try. Visit

--> http://klik.atekon.de/wiki/index.php/KOffice-1.5.0_DistroTable
--> http://klik.atekon.de/wiki/index.php/User%27s_FAQ

for some details...

by Evan "JabberWok... (not verified)

:) Yes, I'm aware. Thanks.

I think it's a testament to KOffice that there are people who don't have time to test new versions because they are too busy using it for real work.