Thread: KOffice 2.0 debuts with a well thought out UI

Marking the end of more than three years of work to port KOffice to Qt 4 and the KDE4libraries and, in some cases, totally rewrite the engine of the KOffice applications, the KOffice team has finally announced version 2.0.0 ofKOffice. The intention, according to the developers, has been to increase integration between the components ofKOffice, decrease duplication of functionality, and ease maintenance and development of new features. Furthermore, new approaches to ill design and interacting with the user have been implemented to support the new capabilities. The team has claimed that the release is mainly aimed at developers, testers and early adopters.

KOffice 2.0 does not have all the features that KOffice 1.6 had. These features will return in the upcoming versions 2.1 and 2.2, in most cases better implemented and more efficient. Also, not all applications that were part of KOffice 1.6 made it into KOffice 2.0. The missing applications will return in 2.1 or possibly 2.2. The release team has decided that the following aplications are mature enough to be part of2.0: KWord (word processor), KSpread (spreadsheet), KPresenter (presentation tool), KPlato (project management), Karbon (vector graphics editor) and Krita (raster graphics editor).

Besides this, the chart application KChart is available as a shape plug-in, which means that charts are available in all the KOffice applications in an integrated manner. The desktop database creator Kexi and the formula shape are aimed to be made available in version 2.1.