KDE Office Suite

About a year ago, the Calligra community added a new application to the suite by the name of Krita Gemini, which combined the functionality of the Krita digital painting application with the touch optimised user interface of the tablet focused Krita Sketch, into a shell with the ability to switch between the two at runtime. The goal was to create a responsive user interface for Krita, and this is now a part of Calligra. In May of this year, Intel approached the team which produced Krita Gemini with the idea of doing the same for other parts of Calligra, by creating an application which would encapsulate the Words and Stage components in the same way as Krita Gemini did for the Krita component.

Now, about half a year later, we have an application which, while rough around the edges, works for day to day use. In fact, the author of this article has been using Calligra Gemini to produce both a novel and a short story, as well as various other bits of work, and a presentation which was shown off at the Qt Developer Days 2014 in Berlin. Also worth mentioning here is that the pdf, epub and mobi versions of the short story available on the page there were also all created using Calligra Gemini, functionality which is available out of the box with Calligra.

Calligra—the productivity suite from KDE—has made its second release. The nine applications in the suite have all received new features and bug fixes, such as improved table editing in Words, neater cell editor in Sheets and a compositions docker in Krita for movie storyboard generation.

The KOffice team is very happy to announce the arrival of KOffice 2.2.0, half a year after version 2.1 was released. This release brings an unprecedented number of new features and bugfixes as can be seen in the full list of changes. Read on for a summary of the highlights.

The KOffice team is happy to announce the first beta of the upcoming 2.2 release of KOffice. This release brings back Kexi, the data management application similar to MS Access. The new beta also offers many new features and improvements, for example improved support for Microsoft file formats with the addition of import filters for MS OOXML, and bug fixes.

The KOffice team is very happy to announce version 2.1.0 of KOffice, 6 months after the platform release 2.0.0. This release brings a number of new features as well as general improvements in the maturity of the individual applications. Importing of documents have also been given an overhaul.

Today Nokia employee Thomas Zander announced in his blog that Nokia will be using KOffice as a base for the office file viewer in Maemo 5. He also sent an email to the KOffice mailing list giving some more details about how this came to be.

"This shows that KOffice has one of the best technical foundations", says Jan Hambrecht, one of the core developers of KOffice. "It is both lightweight, flexible and very fast, which makes it perfect in embedded environments like a smart phone".

Nokia has created a customized GUI based on the Maemo 5 touch screen interface on top of the KOffice core. It has also worked on making the support for MS Office documents more mature. Thomas Zander of Qt Development Framework and KO GmbH worked on fixing bugs and enhancing support for MS Office formats.

The first presentation of this work will be at the Maemo Summit in Amsterdam from October 9th to 11th.

The KOffice team today announced the second beta of the upcoming 2.1 release. The KOffice community has now switched from adding new features to only fix the remaining bugs, and that is obvious from this release. The first beta of 2.1 was released without any fanfares, but it marked the transition into the bugfixing stage. We now think it's time to let the users start to participate in the process. You can see the progress in the full changelog.

Last weekend — it seems like yesterday and like a year ago at the same time — the KOffice team came to Berlin for the first post 2.0 sprint. Graciously hosted by KDAB and smoothly organized by Alexandra Leisse, this sprint was one of the most productive sprints ever for KOffice. Not only because there were many developers attending, among them three out of four of our KOffice Summer of Code students, but also because everyone was filled to the brim with joy and relief about having release 2.0 and eager to forge forwards to 2.1.

The KOffice team is extremely pleased to finally announce version 2.0.0 of KOffice. This release marks the end of more than 3 years of work to port KOffice to Qt 4 and the KDE 4 libraries and, in some cases, totally rewrite the engine of the KOffice applications.

Over the last few years, the KOffice team has reworked the framework into an agile and flexible codebase. Our intention was to increase integration between the components of KOffice, decrease duplication of functionality and ease maintenance and development of new features. Furthermore, new approaches to UI design and interacting with the user have been implemented to support the new capabilities.

This is the first release -- we call it a "Platform Release" -- of a long series, much like KDE 4.0 laid the groundwork for what is now a fully mature desktop environment. The developers have so far concentrated on creating a flexible and powerful foundation that we can build on for a long time.

Today, the KOffice team has released the first, and hopefully the only, release candidate for KOffice 2.0, bringing more than three years of work to a temporary conclusion. Compared to Beta 7, this release candidate brings a multitude of bug fixes and not a single new feature, as it should be!

See the changelog for all details, the release notes for download links, or the announcement for more details.