NewsForge's contributor Bruce Byfield wrote a hands-on comparison between KSpread 1.3.5, OpenOffice.org Calc beta build 1.9.83 and Gnumeric 1.4.3-6. Seems like KSpread is doing pretty well - the charting capabilities were second to none, and reviewer mentioned KSpread to be a good choice for people making visual presentations. KSpread still needs love and care as handling lists was found to be limited.

LWN has reviewed the recent KOffice 1.4 beta. They look at the existing applications in the suite and the new additions of image editor Krita and database manager Kexi. The conclusion is that "the KOffice 1.4 release will be a significant move forward for KOffice". David Faure has also commented on the file incompatibility (non-subscriber copy) issues mentioned in the article.

The KDE Project today announced the release of KOffice 1.4beta1, the first preview release for KOffice 1.4, scheduled for release this June. KOffice is an integrated office suite with more components than any other suite in existence. This release specifically introduces the database management application Kexi, the image editor Krita and upgrades the major KOffice components to use the OASIS Open Document format, an industry standard allowing better interoperability across applications and platforms. A KOffice Live-CD has been created and several distributions provide binary packages. Read the full announcement and the changelog for more details.

Although KOffice may not yet be at the level of functionality of OpenOffice, it is still a pretty powerful office suite albeit with relatively little coverage. This is the first of my series of easy How-To's for KOffice that hopefully anyone can follow. The first How-To, including screenshots, shows you how you can easily make use of the mail merge feature in your KWord documents.

Linux.com is featuring an article about using KOffice to create good-looking reports. The article covers importing from a database into KSpread, preparing the data for KChart and formatting it in KWord.

As well as the official talks at FOSDEM we will also be hosting 5 talks in the KDE developers room. The KDE FOSDEM team interviewed the speakers to get some background. The first interview is with Raphael Langerhorst whose talk is titled "KOffice - Desktop Integration and Workflow Automation".

KOffice is built on KDE. This advantage brings enormous potential in terms of integration, performance, scalability, and with the coming full support for the OASIS Open Document Format, even portability. All these factors are vital for business deployments. The KOffice team is looking for contributors and developers to significantly increase and utilize the potential of KOffice even further.

OpenOffice.org 1.1.3 with KDE integration is now available for download. It also features a lot of other improvements over the stock OOo (including the GNOME integration bits; but do not be afraid, it does not link against Gtk+ in KDE, and vice versa), because it is built from the ooo-build codebase.

The KOffice team is happy to bring you the fifth bugfix release of KOffice. KOffice 1.3.5 features a new language (Breton), the PDF import filter includes a stronger security fix and there are also a few fixes for the OpenOffice.org Impress Export Filter.
See the release notes and the list of changes for full details.

We have released Kexi 0.1 beta 5 ( href="http://www.kexi-project.org/changelog-0.1-beta5.html">change log),
the integrated environment for managing data. Kexi aims to become an open-source replacement for MS Access yet ubiquitously available on
Linux/Unix, Windows, and soon, even MacOSX. Kexi has the potential to become a key application in the adoption of
KDE, KOffice, Linux and free software in general, for individuals as well as companies and independent software vendors.